On "Forbes Newsroom," Ilya Somin, a legal scholar and attorney, discussed his and the Liberty Justice Center's lawsuit against the Trump Administration which aims to end the President's tariffs, and called President Trump's tariff actions a show of the danger of sweeping presidential powers.
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00:01Professor, one thing we can say for certain is that there's been whiplash with these tariff policies.
00:06After the reciprocal tariffs went into effect, they were largely paused for 90 days.
00:10But that 10 percent baseline remains for most countries.
00:13The tit for tat with China has been ratcheted up to at this point, as you and I are sitting here, as high as 245 percent.
00:21Does this pause do anything to the lawsuit?
00:24No. First of all, as you mentioned, there are still 10 percent tariffs on almost every country in the world.
00:30That by itself is the highest tariff schedule in close to 100 years or more.
00:35And obviously, there's also the trade war with China as well that's still ongoing on without cause.
00:40But even the rest is not permanently ended. It's only paused for 90 days.
00:44And that's still a violation of the law for him to say is going to be in place 90 days from now.
00:51And more fundamentally, one of the problems with concentrating power over this in the hands of one man is that he can constantly change things.
00:59Any time he wants, if he has that power and that eliminates the certainty and clarity, the businesses and consumers and just even ordinary Americans, they need to be able to plan their affairs.
01:11Think about if you're investing in a factory, but you don't know what the tariff rate is going to be tomorrow.
01:15So that's a severe deterrent to making that investment.
01:18If you're signing contracts for a delivery of goods, many of which by their nature have to be advanced contracts for commitments over a period of months or years.
01:27Once again, you need some clarity and certainty on what are the prices you're going to be paying.
01:32And if you can't have that, that severely damages the world and American economies and raises prices for consumers and even cutting off access to some important goods almost completely.
01:42This is not the first lawsuit on President Trump's tariffs.
01:46There was another one on other IEPA tariffs from February over President Trump's China tariffs there.
01:52Do you think that this is eventually going to make its way to the Supreme Court?
01:57I think it's possible.
01:59We'll have to see how our lawsuit works out.
02:02And also there's two other significant losses that have been filed.
02:05The one you mentioned, also one in Montana filed by members of the Blackfeet Nation and Native American tribe.
02:12And I have heard today the announcement that the state of California is going to file a lawsuit challenging at least some of the IEPA tariffs.
02:20So I think there's a decent chance this will get to the Supreme Court.
02:23We'll just have to see about that.
02:25You're arguing that President Trump is exceeding his authority.
02:28He's overstepping the Constitution.
02:30Legally, what do you think are some of the implications here when it comes to presidential powers?
02:34So we think that he's going way beyond the legitimate scope of presidential power.
02:40And if he's allowed to get away with it, we will have one man rule over this vast realm of the American economy.
02:46That's unconstitutional.
02:48But it's also dangerous for the reasons that I've already mentioned, that we don't want one man, you know, if he wakes up on the wrong side of his bed, to be able to start a global trade war any time he feels like it.
02:59Even if you trust President Trump with this authority, which frankly I do not, think about, do you trust the next Democratic president with it?
03:05Do you think Joe Biden would do a great job if he had this power or Kamala Harris or whoever the next president is going to be?
03:11To my mind, no one person, whether Democrat or Republican, can be trusted with this much power over our lives and our economy.
03:18And in fact, the founding fathers deliberately designed the Constitution to prevent that from happening.