David J. Lynch

The other part of the controversy is the president's identification of the trade deficit as an emergency.

We've, as you know, Steve, run an annual trade deficit every year since 1975 when I was in high school.

And so there are a lot of people who have pushed back on that and said that's not really the definition of an emergency.

the administration's counter, as Scott Besson said in the clip, was that 50 years of this have brought the U.S.

economy to a quote-unquote tipping point.

I don't think the administration has really elaborated on exactly how imminent that tipping point is or how it would manifest itself.

But, you know, the advantage of using IEPA

is it does convey broad and immediate powers on the president, so he could act without a lot of bureaucracy, without a lot of time wasting, and just come out on a given day and say, bang, tariff of X on goods from country Y, and we're done and dusted.

The alternatives, which is what the administration might be forced to fall back on, are other sections of U.S.

trade law that are more cumbersome but can ultimately get you to the same place.

That seems to be the thinking.

I mean, the court agreed to take it up on an expedited basis, so the implication is the ruling will come on an expedited basis.

What will happen, you know, they, the government, have collected something like $90 billion via these emergency tariffs.

If the court were to invalidate all of them and order

a refund to all of the importers who've paid them, and that's not certain.

The government would then be in a position of having to set up some administrative procedure to make that happen.

There's one sort of past example of a case like this.

It was something called the Harbor Maintenance Fund years and years ago.

I won't bore you with many of the details.

But in that case, there was an administrative process set up.