05-29-25 *INTERVIEW* Jeff Schwab of Liberty Justice Center on Trump Tariff Ruling

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So listen. When I saw the news yesterday that a
federal court in I think's in Manhattan struck down almost
all of President Trump's tariffs, I think I literally cheered
out loud and joining us to talk about it. He
probably cheered out loud. Well, he probably wanted to cheer
out loud, but maybe did after he got out of
the courtroom.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Maybe it wasn't in the courtroom.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Jeff Schwab is senior counsel at Liberty Justice Center, and
it was the lead attorney on the case. So Jeff
won this case. What an exciting day. Jeff, congratulations, thanks.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Very much, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Did you cheer out loud?

Speaker 2 (00:38):
I did cheer out loud, and I had to double
The way that I received it was via email, which
is how we received our court filings, and I did
a double take because I was like, is that say
what I think it says? So it was very exciting.
So give us just get it.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Be a little bit legally nerdy with us here. What
was your primary argument or primary couple of arguments regarding
your assertion that President Trump did not have the authority
to impose most of his tariffs.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
We had I think we had six independent arguments that
we made, but basically they were that the AEFA, which
is what the statute that the administration relied on, either
doesn't authorize tariffs at all or it doesn't authorize the
unilateral authority by the president to impose any tariffs that

(01:35):
he wants at any rate, at any time on any country.
So that that was one, and then the other sort
of aspect of it was that if the administration was
correct that this interpretation, with this interpretation of a EPA,
then that would create constitutional problems with separation of powers,

(01:56):
because Congress can't just delegate all of its authority, and
of course Congress has the authority to impost Harris under
the Constitution.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
As I read the opinion, and I actually did read
most of it, it sounded to me as if the
current law that President Trump is using as the basis
for this stuff replaced an older law that might have
given previous presidents more authority than the current law gives.
Is that true and if so, do you think that

(02:25):
that adds to your case in the sense of clearly
they intended with the newer law to restrain the president
a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
In fact, there was a series of reform laws by
Congress in the seventies with in the wake of the
Nixon administration, but also that many other presidents prior to
that were using the emergency powers to do basically whatever
they wanted, and so the Congress passed the series of
laws to restrain that, and they passed AIPA in part

(03:00):
to restrain the president's power over issuing tariffs whenever he wanted,
whatever rate he wanted, And so I think the court
recognized that that was the intent of Congress when interpreting AIPA.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
It was a bit strange for them to rely on
AIPA anyway, because in the things that it expressly allows
the president to do, tariffs are not among them. So
it seems like they must have known this was a stretch.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, there's no there's nothing in the statutes specifically that
authorizes the president to impost Harris. In contrast, other statutes
do specifically allow the president to impose Harris, but I
think the administration didn't want to use those because those
statutes have other limitations and procedures that the president has

(03:53):
to follow, and under AIPA, the president thought that it
could just simply declare an emergency and then immediately imposed harriff.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
One of the other things that I found interesting about
this because I had I had Molly Nixon from Pacific
Legal Foundation yesterday talking about her case, which is very
much like yours, and one of the one of the
things that came up is that courts usually hesitate to
get involved in the question of what's an emergency. But

(04:23):
it seemed like this court did a little bit, you know,
I could. It seemed like they said Trump is claiming
things that are emergencies that really can't be called emergencies.
Am I misinterpreting that? No.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
I think the Court was extremely skeptical of the government's
broad claim of power here, including the assertion and oral argument,
and in their brief that the court can't even address
the question of what is an emergency. I told the
court at oral arguments that this case was more like

(04:57):
a wild pitch, and then the question was whether it
was a ball or strike. We don't need to to
debate whether the strikes own bat. The knees are slightly
below when when the ball hit the backs up and
was on the wrong side of the batter.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
I am president of the Bad Analogy Club. You might
not know that and I think you are close to
achieving membership with that one. Very very good.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
All right, last question for you.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Tariffs are among the very very few things that Donald
Trump actually believes in, So he's not going to give up.
His people aren't going to give up, and they're going
to try to find a way to keep doing exactly
what they're doing despite this ruling, just the same way
that Joe Biden kept trying to reassign student loan debt

(05:47):
to tax payers even after the Supreme Court said you can't.
Are you already preparing, you know, sort of red teaming
what you think the administration will do as far as
they're trying to shoehorn these tariffs under some other authority.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
We haven't looked at it specifically because we've been so
focused on stopping these tariffs under AIPA, And of course
we still have that fight left to go because the
administration has appealed to the Federal Circuit and in fact
also asked for a stay of the injunction. So we're
highly focused on that. But you know, if the President

(06:25):
did try to adopt a different justification to try to
do the same thing, we'd obviously look at that and
see whether we thought that was legitimate, and if not,
we would challenge it.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Jeff Wab is senior counsel at Liberty Justice Center. The
website is Liberty Justicecenter dot org. He is the lead
attorney who won the case at the Trade Court yesterday
and hopefully we'll keep winning all the way through. Thank
you for your time, Jeff, and congratulations again.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Thanks so much.