This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel. Welcomeing my good colleague Professor Richard Epstein

teaches law at NYU in the University of Chicago, writing for the Civitas Institute. We turn to

breaking news. Wall Street Journal, Trump's tariffs questioned by appeals court. Subhead, judges voice skepticism that president can use

emergency powers to replace import schedule Congress adopted. One of the judges gave a salient

quote that's useful. This is Judge Timothy Dyke of the court. It's just hard for me to see that

Congress intended to give the president a wholesale authority to throw out the tariff schedule

that Congress adopted after years of careful work. Professor, a very good evening to you. This was always hanging out there

as something that the Trump administration was going to have to confront and either bypass

or get over, get past, or be blocked by, which is a court that is deciding whether the

president has the power to uniformly and unilaterally

declare new tariffs, a power that was delegated in the Constitution, as you've guided me,

to the Congress.

And there's something about you cannot delegate the delegated.

Good evening to you, Professor.

Yes, you sometimes can delegate the delegated, and indeed the International Emergency Economic Act

did exactly that, but they didn't do it under these particular circumstances.

The question about intelligible principle goes back to the 1920s, in which the United States Supreme Court, speaking through

Chief Justice, Tav said, you can delegate to a given body to calculate tariffs. And what that

particular statute did is gave an elaborate formula that allow you to determine almost to the

penny the tariffs that had to be put on certain kinds of imported goods.

And so the definition in that case of an intellectual principle was essentially a mathematical formula that work. In this particular case, there is no such intelligible principle that has that

degree of precision. Indeed, there's no principle at all. And so what happens is there are two questions you have to face.

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