This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 23rd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President boldly claimed last week that his administration would be calling the shots

for governors, telling states when to open their economies back up in the the total over governors. Well, all of that is almost completely wrong. And even though the

president has since backed away from those claims almost completely,

Cato's Gene Healy explains that it's worth taking the president's words

seriously, if not literally.

As we discussed the last time we spoke, we saw the same pattern here.

The president comes out and says something that, well pretty much any constitutional scholar

would tell you simply isn't true, that the president of the United States that the

authority is total with respect to

the governors that the president's authority supersedes that of governors.

Well give us the clearest explanation for precisely why that's wrong.

Well yeah he had kind of a banner week at the daily coronavirus briefings last week of making sort of unhinged

executive power threats. He said on Monday that if the more or less if the states don't do what he wants,

he'll overrule them. He came back Wednesday with if Congress doesn't do what he wants,

he'll shut it down.

And what tends to happen is, you know, there's a media frenzy about this,

you know, law professors and pundits, you know, go and research what, you know, can

you know, do that? And it tends more and more to be absolute as bluster that ends up not getting translated into

policy.

So, you know, he said that, you know, he had total authority over the states and, you know, when you're

...