The Supreme Court struck down a key piece of legislation allowing the President to impose tariffs without congressional approval. What does this mean for the future of trade with China and other major trading partners? What does it mean for other countries and their trade relations with the United States?
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:14.000Today's lead is sometimes you have to come up with a lead, and sometimes the lead finds it is thrust upon you with great anticipation.
00:01:22.000And that is, of course, the tariff decision that has come down from the Supreme Court.
00:01:27.000Now, we spent the morning poring over this.
00:01:30.000We've got Jonathan Carney from Breitbart, who's kind of the resident tariff expert.
00:01:35.000He's going to be joining us any moment now, so I'm told.
00:01:39.000But this was a blockbuster decision that we had been waiting for.
00:01:43.000Now, just to set the terms, this was any tariff that had been established by President Trump under what's called the IEEPA, which is essentially an emergency power that the president has been given by the Congress.
00:01:58.000But it's never really been used to do tariffs.
00:02:00.000Now, its predecessor, what was it called?
00:02:03.000It was like the Trading with the Enemy Act was used one time in a limited fashion, 10% tariffs by President Nixon.
00:02:11.000So it's not completely without precedent, but that law had been replaced by the IEEPA, and it had never been used by a president in the way that President Trump was using.
00:02:22.000They have struck down President Trump's ability to do it.
00:02:27.000So this is, we should just, just to set the stage here, this is mainly the, this is the Liberation Day tariffs that were announced with great fanfare.
00:02:35.000Yeah, about 10 months ago, as well as other tariffs, the reciprocal tariffs he did.
00:02:41.000Also, a lot of what he was doing, where you'd see the president goes on Truth Social and reacts to something and says there will be a 100% tariff on Canada or China until this is changed.
00:02:52.000A lot of those really aggressive tariffs that he would announce on short notice, that's coming through this bill, the IEEPAD, International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
00:03:03.000And what the Supreme Court ruled today, and it is a six to three ruling.
00:03:08.000So that involved of the justices who'd be considered more on the right, that we lost Roberts, we lost Gorsuch, we lost Amy Comey Barrett.
00:03:16.000So that's two of President Trump's three picks, in fact.
00:03:21.000And they said, in essence, that basically the president's claim of power was too large, that the bill is not intended by Congress to allow the president to declare any emergency and thereby impose any tariff.
00:03:38.000So they imply even in the ruling that if it had been, if it had been more concrete, if he'd said these tariffs are maybe lower or for a more limited duration, he probably would have held up stronger.
00:03:50.000They seem to take issue with what they say is the president claiming almost total unlimited authority, you might say, over the ability to regulate international trade.
00:05:02.000I've proposed something I call IACES, which is a licensing regime that would actually link the ability of other countries to export to the U.S. to a license fee that would totally be allowed under IEPA.
00:05:17.000So this is another thing that they can do under IEPA that the administration hasn't yet fully considered.
00:05:24.000A big question to me is what do the other countries do?
00:05:30.000Remember, a lot of them have lowered their own trade barriers, lowered their own tariffs in response to our threatening to raise tariffs.
00:05:39.000So the question is, do they go back on this?
00:05:42.000If they do, I think that actually will provide a reason for Congress to actually give this authority to the U.S. president.
00:05:51.000That's the cleanest way to resolve all this.
00:05:53.000Congress needs to enact presidential tariff authority tomorrow, frankly.
00:06:00.000So you're saying you could enact a license fee, which would essentially accomplish the exact same goal here.
00:06:08.000It would just be under a different name.
00:06:10.000And that's kind of one of the pushbacks that Kavanaugh, who wrote the dissent here, which is really fascinating.
00:06:17.000He basically says, although I firmly disagree with the court's holdings, because he was the dissenter, the decision might not substantially constrain a president's ability to order tariffs going forward.
00:06:27.000That is because numerous other federal statutes authorize the president to impose tariffs and might justify most, if not all, of the tariffs at issue in this case.
00:06:36.000And then he goes on to list, which I found interesting because he's basically giving a roadmap here.
00:06:42.000Those statutes include, for example, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Section 232, the Trade Act of 1974, sections 122 and 201, and the Tariff Act of 1930, Section 338.
00:06:55.000In essence, the court today concludes that the president checked the wrong statutory box by relying on IEPA rather than another statute to impose these tariffs.
00:07:06.000Okay, I guess if we're going to go by the letter of the law, not by the spirit of it, this is probably in some ways you could consider the correct decision.
00:07:14.000But it's also bizarre and sort of insane, John, because there's other reasons to believe that he could ban all imports.
00:07:22.000The court is concluding he could just go to China.
00:07:39.000Kavanaugh actually points this out that there's that the majority decision basically says Trump is allowed to ban whatever he wants, but he can't oppose a one dollar tariff.
00:08:11.000Everybody heard the way that oral arguments went.
00:08:15.000So this decision hasn't come to us as a surprise to anyone.
00:08:18.000In fact, a lot of people, I mean, I would say the consensus was that the tariffs, at least all of the tariffs, weren't going to survive.
00:08:27.000If there's any surprise, it's just how this is pretty, you know, just says the president can't do this at all.
00:08:33.000There's a pretty blanket slop down of the IPA tariffs.
00:08:36.000But like I said, even under IEPA, they could ban things.
00:08:40.000They could put license fees on things.
00:08:42.000So you can't use the magic word tariff.
00:08:45.000You know, we'll find another way to protect American industry.
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00:11:20.000It could actually take years of litigation because you'll have to prove that you paid the tariff, that you paid the tariff that was an IEPA tariff and not a different tariff.
00:11:29.000And there would be other considerations.
00:11:31.000It's not clear that the money is going to go away right away.
00:11:38.000And so, you know, that money won't come out of the U.S. Treasury, I'd say, for quite a while.
00:11:44.000If I were a business entitled to the tariffs, what you did is you basically made sure you had records showing exactly which tariffs you paid so that you could then come to the court later and say, please refund these.
00:12:46.000So you think this is going to be litigated.
00:12:47.000And apparently Wharton School is saying that importers generally have 180 days after goods are liquidated to protest and request refunds from U.S. customs and border protection.
00:13:02.000So the process is people paid the tariffs.
00:13:05.000They had to have submitted basically a piece of paper saying, I don't think I should have paid that tariff.
00:13:13.000One unfortunate thing about that is, look, the really big importers, big companies, Walmart, the international companies that import stuff into the U.S., they've already filed that paperwork.
00:13:25.000It's really actually going to be the small guys who really get kind of messed around with here because they probably didn't file the paperwork and or some of them didn't.
00:13:39.000So some of the tariffs that have been paid will still be eligible for refunds.
00:13:44.000But we, again, we don't know what the refund process will look like.
00:13:48.000As far as I know, we've never had anything this big where, you know, $150 billion, $170 billion is potentially being refunded to the people who paid the tariffs in the first place.
00:14:04.000Yeah, I think Kavanaugh refers to it as a mess.
00:15:23.000Even though, like, in the spirit of the law, it certainly indicates that he would be.
00:15:26.000Now, so just to read exactly what Kavanaugh said, I got the quote here.
00:15:31.000In the meantime, however, the interim effects of this court's decision could be substantial.
00:15:35.000The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.
00:15:45.000So, you know, their whole argument was that Americans absorb these taxes.
00:15:52.000It's probably about an 80-20 import to American consumers, 20%.
00:15:56.000But if let's assume that they were right about that, then Americans are basically going to get double tax because of this court decision, which is hilarious.
00:16:05.000So he goes, as acknowledged at Oro argument, the refund process is likely to be a mess.
00:16:13.000And a lot of this money is actually going to leave the U.S. altogether because a huge amount of imports are actually done through foreign companies and their U.S. affiliates.
00:16:23.000So it's actually going to be payments going to foreigners as well, which is really unfortunate.
00:16:46.000I would also say that we have just gotten word that he has a 1245 Eastern press conference that we're going to be looking for on this tariff decision.
00:18:17.000Charlie believed in finding good people and connecting them with other good people that he cared about.
00:18:21.000When someone truly took care of him, Charlie would never hesitate to recommend them.
00:18:25.000Andrew Del Rey and Todd of Akin were two of those people.
00:18:28.000They personally helped Charlie and Erica with their mortgage needs, and Charlie trusted them completely.
00:18:33.000Whether it was a home buyer trying to qualify or someone needing to consolidate debt or see if they could get a lower rate in payments, these were the guys Charlie sent people to.
00:20:21.000So my first thought, just trying to be in the mind of the president, is he's going to be super annoyed at the Chief Justice, but he didn't pick the Chief Justice.
00:20:30.000But two of the three justices the president put on the court voted against him, Gorsuch and Cony Barrett.
00:20:36.000So my suspicion is the president probably will vent that on Truth Social.
00:20:41.000But the larger issue, more than, as you point out, all the mechanical things involving tariffs, which are super important, is this is the first time the courts really weighed in substantively on the president's powers.
00:20:54.000They've done some procedural things, but they've ruled against him.
00:20:57.000And there's a ton of pending cases in other areas, not about tariffs, where if the same justices or even a 5-4 vote against him decide they're not afraid to vote against Donald Trump, right?
00:21:09.000Everybody likes to pretend these are legal decisions.
00:21:13.000It's really disheartening because they should be legal.
00:21:15.000But justices are pretty political, not just the current ones, not just the ones picked by Republicans or the ones picked by Democrats.
00:21:22.000So if I were the president's political team, I'd be worried that in the future, when some of these other cases come up, that they may be on the short end of five to four or six to three decisions that will really be impactful for what the president can do.
00:21:37.000And it also, one of the thoughts I had this morning was, you know, we hear about Democrats wanting to pack the courts, wanting to call it a lawless court.
00:21:44.000And here you go, them doing exactly the opposite of what the president was lobbying for.
00:21:53.000Well, just real quickly, I would concern the other way that we know the president was very invested in this tariff case.
00:22:01.000I don't know that it would be an exaggeration to say it was his top personal brand, his top priority.
00:22:06.000He's really fulminated on truth and in other venues about the importance of this case.
00:22:13.000Should there be any concern among people that the president might up rhetoric on actually, I don't need to listen to the Supreme Court on this sort of thing?
00:22:22.000Do you think there's any hazard of that?
00:22:24.000I mean, I know that's talked about a lot, particularly on the left and amongst others.
00:22:31.000There have been a few things like some of the immigration orders, like the planes that were in the air on the way to Venezuela, where people have sort of tried to suggest that that was lawless and violation of a court order.
00:22:41.000That's a close call, but I don't think so.
00:22:43.000I'll tell you, though, the other political thing that's where this decision is in the president's interest, and I don't mean to give a short shrift to your question, but I hope I sufficiently answered it.
00:22:54.000But, you know, before the Supreme Court decision, there were three big pieces of economic news that were going to, I think, really do harm to the markets.
00:23:02.000And four, if you count what was happening in the last day with oil markets because of worries about Iran.
00:23:07.000First was yesterday this firm Blue Owl Capital made some decision about investors and money that really were spooking people and getting people to talk about, is this the first sign like we saw in 2007 leading into the economic crash of 2008?
00:23:24.000Then this morning we had two horrible economic numbers for the country and for the president politically.
00:23:30.000A lower than expected GDP number by a lot, a higher than expected inflation number.
00:23:36.000I will never know what the stock market would have done today had we not had the Supreme Court decision on tariffs.
00:23:42.000But as I look down now, the Dow's up and the Dow is likely to end really far up because although this is bad news politically for the president, the markets love this decision.
00:23:51.000And so if you talk about the implications politically for the president, if he hadn't had this decision, he'd be going into the state of the union with a lot of negative negativity about the economy.
00:24:03.000Now, a lot of people, at least in the markets, are going to be positive about the economy into the weekend and into next week because they don't want the tariffs.
00:24:10.000And a lot of Republican politicians are going to be happy too because they don't want the tariffs.
00:24:14.000Well, and that's a good point, Mark, because we always have to kind of, I think in our mind, we have to bifurcate between normie and politically plugged in, right?
00:24:24.000Politically plugged in, they're really into the DC of it all.
00:24:26.000They're into the tug of war, the political jockeying.
00:24:29.000The normies just want more money in their wallet.
00:24:32.000They just want to make sure that they got a job.
00:24:34.000They just want to make sure they can go to their soccer practice for their kids.
00:25:22.000It's also important, while we don't know what's going to happen to the tariff revenue that's already been collected, which is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, that's going to be kicked down to a lower court, and we're going to find out what happens that whole other year, probably.
00:26:13.000You also talked about these key, and I saw the through line here, Mark.
00:26:18.000These are populist sort of, you get a scalp issue, right?
00:26:24.000You said messages that break through, banning stock trading for Congress, transparency on health insurance data, including the pricing and claims reimbursement, lowering prescription drug costs, and the Trump tax cuts.
00:26:36.000These are all issues where you get to go, we got the bad guy.
00:27:03.000History, as I said at this meeting, and again, this was the president's sort of political high command briefing, the chiefs of staff, the cabinet members, their chiefs of staff, their other senior aides.
00:27:58.000The one thing they said at the meeting that I think has not gotten as much attention as I thought it would is they said in the meeting, these are the right issues to talk about, the ones you listed about health insurance and about the Trump tax cuts, et cetera.
00:28:10.000They said, that's what the data shows.
00:28:12.000That's what you all should talk about when you're out campaigning, when you're on media, when you're on programs like this.
00:28:17.000They said, there's going to be a whole other campaign that's run by our best athlete, Donald John Trump.
00:29:37.000One of the big questions that's going to come out of the State of the Union on Tuesday is: are Democrats willing to vote for stuff that they believe in, that they think would be good for their constituents, but it will give the president a political win?
00:29:51.000There's a big housing bill in the House and the Senate both passed separate bills.
00:29:54.000They're different, but there's some overlap.
00:29:56.000Are Democrats going to vote on final passage so Donald Trump can have a signing ceremony and say he did something to make housing more affordable?
00:30:03.000Would they vote for the stock ban and the president sign it where he gets the front of the parade and gets credit?
00:30:10.000And on the stock trade thing, we'll have to see if Republicans want to vote for it because plenty of Republicans have opposed that as well.
00:30:16.000Well, yeah, so you're asking the fundamental patriot question.
00:30:20.000Do Democrats love America more than they hate Donald Trump?
00:30:27.000And do some Republican House members like their vacation homes more than they like doing what the voters want regarding transparency on sales.
00:30:34.000Listen, we are equal opportunity offenders when it comes to corrupt Republicans, rhino Republicans.
00:30:40.000And listen, this is central to Charlie's legacy.
00:30:42.000He wanted a Republican Party that was as conservative as its voters, that loved its country as much as its voters.
00:30:47.000And so these are questions that we're going to see come to the fore, and we're going to be pounding that drum.
00:31:25.000And so you'll hear people talk about it.
00:31:28.000It won't be absent from the rhetoric, the present, certainly, but it's not a silver bullet.
00:31:32.000It's not something that they think should be at the centerpiece of making the argument for the midterm elections.
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00:32:40.000All right, Mark, just real quick here, there's an EJ Antonio tweet, who you might remember, EJ Antoni, was up for a spot in the admin here.
00:32:50.000He said growth came in at just 1.4%, but here's why.
00:32:53.000Government purchases tanked almost 5.1%, pulling the headline number down almost a full percentage point.
00:33:07.000There's also some truth to the president's spin from earlier today, even before the numbers came out, which he's really not supposed to do, that the government shutdown, which he blames on the Democrats, also ate into the GDP.
00:33:20.000But again, I've talked to a lot of economic experts since the numbers came out, and, you know, they're not great.
00:33:27.000It's arguably the worst single day of economic data since Trump returned to office.
00:34:57.000She said that that plan had been in place before and that she actually stayed on longer than she was anticipating just to make sure that the Minneapolis thing was handled well.
00:35:07.000All right, that joking aside, we just wish Trisha the best.
00:35:12.000I think that The main impact of it is the Democrats are fired up.
00:35:21.000I don't know how the government normally I can make up a scenario to end a government shutdown, partial or full.
00:35:26.000I don't know how this one ends because the Democrats are so fired up in Washington and around the country.
00:35:31.000And again, one of the criticisms you guys have heard me make many times of the left is Trump derangement syndrome and just anger about President Trump.
00:35:43.000But in general, they're not sensitive to it.
00:35:46.000So I always say to folks in MAGA, you get so frustrated that the left doesn't understand why you support Donald Trump.
00:35:51.000You all need to understand they're really upset about those two people being killed, really upset.
00:35:55.000And they're upset about it in a different way than President Trump says he's upset about it.
00:35:59.000They're upset about it because they think it's a manifestation of a lawless policy that's still largely in place, even though, even with the withdrawal from Minnesota.
00:36:07.000So they're going to raise money off of it.
00:36:27.000Democrats have gone from being the party on the wrong side of immigration-related issues to being the party mostly, not entirely, on the right side of immigration-related issues.
00:36:39.000And I don't know where it's going to go.
00:36:40.000And I think to a large extent, whatever impact it has on the midterms, the story will be told to a degree by how this partial government shut down.
00:36:49.000So you talk about how we don't understand each other.
00:36:52.000I understand why they would see those images and get fired up about it.
00:36:56.000There just seems to be zero acknowledgement of how we got here that 10 to 15 million illegals stormed the border and we just basically said to hell with our immigration laws for four years.
00:37:19.000No, there's also a little appreciation for the fact that they want people whose families are doxed, who are docks themselves, who are under threat while they're trying to do their jobs and not protected by local law enforcement to just go up there and walk around and let people try to run them over or shoot at them or harass them while they're having dinner.
00:37:38.000So no doubt that, but again, this is the sort of trap that both sides, red and blue, fall into.
00:37:44.000You're pointing out things that are true, but you're pointing those out instead of saying, I guess maybe I don't have the full appreciation for why they're so upset about those two people being killed.
00:37:55.000Because if I did, maybe I'd say, well, let me read Senator Schumer's proposals and see if any of those things would keep anybody else from being killed.
00:38:02.000So again, part of my job is to try to explain red to blue and blue to red.
00:38:10.000They're really upset in a profound way that transcends their failure to close the border or appreciate that the border was open and that's what led to this.
00:38:19.000It does strike me, it does feel like politically, as your tweet showed, there's this big difficulty in the president and the Republicans harvesting Palestine wins off of some of their biggest successes.
00:38:34.000We seem to have net outflow of illegal immigrants, and it's like people forget about it.
00:38:38.000And I'm thinking about also, apparently, we are at some of the lowest, we might have the lowest murder rate since the 1950s.
00:38:43.000That's a very big shift from Ali Biden.
00:38:46.000Yeah, massive drops in all of the, in major crimes in big cities, and it coincided with that push from the president.
00:38:53.000And he doesn't seem to be reaping much political benefit from that either.
00:38:56.000Well, I think if you look at sort of below the radar of the numbers of the president, mostly it's the economy.
00:39:03.000I think if the economy was positive and people felt the Trump economy was way better than the Biden economy, which they don't think, some polls show they think the Biden economy, Biden economy was better, then I think the president would be getting a lot of credit.
00:40:03.000My sense right now is he'll wait 10 days or so to give the Iranians a chance, maybe one more chance to prove they're serious about negotiating.
00:40:11.000But if they don't come back within a week or so with a pretty serious, not a stallball, but a serious proposal to deal at least with their nuclear capability.
00:40:21.000I don't know yet about missiles, but if they don't come back with a serious proposal, I do think there'll be a substantial attack.
00:40:26.000And I think no ground troops, no nation building, but there'll be a substantial attack to try to degrade not just their nuclear and missile capability, but to undermine the regime.
00:40:35.000I think, yeah, I would anticipate a head of the snake operation similar to Venezuela if they're going to do it.