This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 12, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What could a President Trump do on the subject of American trade Policy without consulting Congress?

The unfortunate answer may be quite a lot.

Dan Eekinson directs the Cato Institute's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy

Studies, he comments.

With his nominees for U.S. Trade Representative and head of the Commerce Department, the President in general can do a lot to

stymie positive trade relationships, bringing a lot of cases at the World Trade Organization, for example,

but what else can the president do and where are we unclear on what the president can do with respect to making trade less friendly?

I would say that the past several months has brought into focus the idea that the president does actually have

some powers to thwart trade.

Under the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, the authority to regulate foreign commerce is vested in the legislature.

The executive branch has the authority to engage in foreign treaties including negotiating trade

treaties. But over the years Congress demonstrated itself to be a bit erratic with respect to tariff policy when we had

Republican Congresses tariffs tended to go up when we had Democratic

majority Congresses tariffs tended to come down and this this was a battle that raged basically from the civil war until about 1930, the famous, infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff act.

And it's quite a reversal. I mean, over that, it's a long time period, of course,

but that's quite a reversal for Republicans

to have gone from the sort of protectionist trade people

to Democrats, and it was credit to FDR.

To FDR certainly I think you know Republicans came to recognize between 1930 when

Smoot-Haw Holly took effect.

...