Danielle Kurtzleben

He had claimed he had the ability to impose tariffs when he wanted, at what level he wanted.

And as the head of an economic superpower, that gave Trump massive leverage over other countries.

And he used that to make trade deals on pharmaceutical pricing, even for diplomacy.

And now he doesn't necessarily have that same power anymore.

Well, in the case that we're talking about here, we're talking about a law called IEPA.

You're going to hear us say IEPA a million times today.

IEPA stands for the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

It's an act from the 1970s that the Trump administration said allowed him to impose just sweeping tariffs on goods from all over the world.

The only thing was that he had to declare an emergency first.

So those tariffs can only be used in case of emergency, he said.

And so

He imposed them to deal with what he said were two emergencies.

One is a large trade deficit with many countries, and the other is fentanyl.

So he said, look, the fentanyl trade and also our trade deficits so big, we're going to use these tariffs to try to cover those.

Now, one important point here.

That covers just the tariffs that are on particular countries.

So if Trump said we are imposing tariffs on goods from China, Canada, Mexico, those are IEPA tariffs.

Well, like you said, it's a 6-3 decision.

And those six justices who said, nope, you can't do these tariffs, they were a little bit split on why he can't.

But the basic idea is that Congress just didn't give him explicitly the