Hello again, everyone.

Welcome to the Cato Institute podcast.

My name is Scott Linsicum, Vice President of General Economics and Trade here at Cato.

And I'm Brent Scorup.

I'm the legal fellow at the Center for Constitutional Studies at Cato.

And Brent and I are here right off the heels of the Supreme Court oral arguments in the big

tariff cases that just happened earlier today.

And we are going to dig into those cases.

And I'm going to ask Brent a bunch of questions about them.

But before we get to that, I think it's probably first best for me to set the table as to what the heck has

happened over the last seven months, why this is a pretty radical shift in policy, and how

it ended up at the Supreme Court. So with that, I think the best place to start is in January with President Trump's election

and entry into back into the Oval Office shortly after Trump took over.

He instituted emergency tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China after declaring a national emergency

with respect to fentanyl, alleging that those tariffs were needed to get those countries

to cooperate more in stemming the cross-border flow of fentanyl into the United States,

which was causing a public health emergency, so they claimed. That was an unprecedented use

of the law at issue, the International Economic Powers Act, or IEPA, which had never been used

before to impose tariffs. And quite frankly, that trade dorks like me were not expecting.

We were expecting other tariff laws because there are a bunch of them.

We've written papers about them.

Aipa was a long shot and one that we thought was not going to be used unlike all those other tariff laws.

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