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Bannon`s War Room

Episode 4905: SCOTUS Listens To Oral Arguments On Trump's Tariffs

06 Nov 2025

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What recent legislative changes affect presidential emergency powers?

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January 2023, Congress voted to terminate one of the biggest IEPA emergencies ever, the COVID emergency, and the president went along with that. So what the statute reflects is there's gonna be the ability for a sort of political consensus against a declared emergency. What happens when the president simply vetoes legislation to try to take these powers back?

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Well, he has the authority to veto legislation to terminate a national emergency, for example. I mean, he retains the powers in the background because he's still on the books. But if he declares an emergency and Congress doesn't like it and passes a joint resolution, yes, he can absolutely veto that.

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So Congress is a practical matter, can't get this power back once it's handed it over to the president. It's a one-way ratchet toward the...

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Chapter 2: How does Congress regain power from the president during emergencies?

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gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people's elected representatives. I disagree with that. And the recent historical counterexample of Congress's termination of the COVID emergency demonstrates that political, the political oversight. With the president's assent. With the president's assent, in fact, you know.

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Once he lost it by a veto-proof majority in the Senate, I think the position, I think he realized, and that's the political process working. There was a little consensus against it to coalesce.

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Chapter 3: What role does the Supreme Court play in executive power disputes?

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It takes a super majority, a veto-proof majority to get it back. Yeah. Okay. The Supreme Court is considering that, and they might even be drawing a line here. The conservative majority has already done quite a bit to expand the authorities of the executive branch under President Trump. You know this. Applying their blanket immunity for what they call official acts.

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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Trump's tariff powers?

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allowing mass layoffs of federal workers, allowing the firing of heads of independent agencies, limiting injunctions that would block President Trump's agenda, or any president's agenda for that matter, allowing the president to cancel billions in funding allocated by Congress.

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But today, the justices seem skeptical over an emergency power that President Trump has made the central feature of his second term in office. The ability for a president to levy massive tariffs unilaterally when Congress has the power of the purse. They were asking for authority essentially to levy taxes.

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As Justice Kavanaugh said today, the Supreme Court needs to figure out what it means to regulate imports. According to the president and his legal team, that would mean including or that would include, I should say, Katie, the imposition of tariffs. According to the challengers, that authority essentially to tax is reserved exclusively to the Congress.

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So they did sound skeptical in places, certainly.

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Chapter 5: How do tariffs impact the balance of trade and economic policy?

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I wonder what your expectation is for when they might rule on on this, because usually we get these these rulings in June. But this is something that Americans are dealing with every single day. So I'd like to say this is an educated guess, but I'm not all that educated. So it's just a guess. But the Supreme Court, at the government's request, did fast track this argument, Katie.

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And so it makes sense to me that they would probably try and fast track an opinion. Normally, when they hear cases in October and November and December, we can expect a decision next June. I imagine it would be quicker than that.

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I want to explain to me how you draw the line because you say we shouldn't be concerned because this is foreign affairs and the President has inherent authority and so delegation off the books, more or less. And if that's true, what would prohibit Congress from just abdicating all responsibility to regulate foreign commerce, for that matter declare war, to the President?

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We don't contend that he could do that. Why not? What's the reason to accept the notion that Congress can hand off the power to declare war to the president? Well, we don't contend that. Again, that would be— Well, you do.

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Chapter 6: What skepticism did justices express during the oral arguments?

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You say it's unreviewable. There's no manageable standard, nothing to be done. And now you're—I think you—tell me if I'm wrong. You backed off that position. Maybe that's fair to say. Okay. All right. Thank you. That would be an abdication. That would really be an abdication, not a delegation. I'm delighted to hear that, you know.

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so i've covered the federalist society which is kind of the lawyer's wing of the republican party for more than a decade now and beginning in the obama administration they're very concerned about president obama and later president biden making aggressive assertions of executive power and they started to the federal society start to come up with new theories for how you could reign in

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um presidential power the one that they eventually settled on is this thing called the major questions doctrine which is the idea that when a president does something that's too ambitious it has too much of an impact of our economy or too much political impact that's not allowed it doesn't matter if there's an existing statute that allows them to do it they got to go back and they got to get a new law

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and one question going into this oral argument was now that we have a republican president would the justices actually follow this major questions doctrine that they came up with to stop presidents like biden and obama or would they give trump an exemption to it and gorsuch at least seems to feel that the major questions doctrine does apply to donald trump um roberts chief justice roberts also asked some questions that he believed that it also applies to republican presidents

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Not all of the Republican justices were there.

Chapter 7: How does the major questions doctrine apply to Trump's tariffs?

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I think that Thomas and Kavanaugh and Alito are probably going to vote with Trump in this case. But it looks like, at least amongst the Republican justices, they seem to be evenly split on whether or not this doctrine should apply to presidents of both parties.

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333.768 - 359.235 Stephen K. Bannon

Larry, I came away very, very optimistic. The solicitor general presented a strong case for the president's use of the IEPA, the emergency tariff powers that President Trump has used to balance trade, to negotiate with the Chinese on fentanyl to secure rare earth magnets. to get the Indians to stop buying Russian oil.

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359.916 - 385.997 Stephen K. Bannon

And the Solicitor General made a fantastic case that the purpose of the tariffs is to rebalance global trade. We were in an economic emergency. We were near a tipping point. And, you know, you and I know exactly what that looks like. And President Trump has brought the U.S. back. On the other side, I thought that the plaintiffs almost embarrassed themselves.

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386.598 - 399.972 Stephen K. Bannon

They clearly didn't understand foundational economics. They didn't understand the trade policy they were talking about. And I'm very optimistic after listening to the questions at SCOTUS that

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Chapter 8: What are the potential outcomes of the Supreme Court ruling?

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The IEPA ruling is going to come President Trump and this administration's way.

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407.886 - 429.262 Steve Bannon

This is the primal scream of a dying regime. Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. I got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. The people have had a belly full of it. I know you don't like hearing that. I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. It's going to happen.

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And where do people like that go to share the big lie? MAGA Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

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439.523 - 449.636 Steve Bannon

Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

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War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bann.

458.968 - 484.026 Steve Bannon

It's Wednesday, 5 November in the year of our Lord, 2025. About this time one year ago, we were starting to get the exit polls. The exit polls were coming out. that talked about how the evening was going to progress to it got to about, I don't know, 10 o'clock, 10.30, when we knew that President Trump was going to win reelection. I'll have more about that later in this hour on this show.

484.58 - 495.111 Steve Bannon

sacred anniversary of the greatest political comeback in American history. But today also, let's get to the work of today. Today was another, it was absolutely historic.

495.251 - 520.965 Steve Bannon

OK, the theory of the case, remember, in the years in the wilderness, Project 2025, Russ Vogt, CRA, Stephen Miller, America First Parties, also the team over at CPI, which I'll be addressing tonight later at one of their conferences. everybody working on all of these aspects of um the second term right which we're very confident we were going to have the political ground game in the

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to get the low-propensity voters to turn people out. You had to have policies unlike the first term, which kind of surprised us when we won, that we needed a depth of public policy, public intellectuals, networks of people, subject matter experts, all of it. We worked for years and years and years, and the catchphrase for that is Project 2025. The central beating heart of this was...

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