I want to start with the statutory text of IEEPA. The law provides that after declaring a national emergency, the president can “investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit any … importation or exportation of … any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”

As you both know, the statute doesn’t contain the words “tariffs,” “duties,” “customs,” “taxes” or any synonym. No other president has used it for tariffs in the roughly 50 years that the statute has been on the books.

Professor Squitieri, in broad strokes before we drill down to the particulars, what is your argument for why the statutory text permits Trump to impose these tariffs?

Squitieri: My argument is that for over 200 years, it’s been understood that the power to regulate foreign importation — foreign commerce via importation — includes a tariff power. The ordinary reading of the statutory phrase “regulate … importation” includes the traditional and well-known tariff power.

And I think the lower courts made a mistake when they insisted that tariff authority can only come from the Taxation Clause [of the Constitution]. That’s a mistake. Tariff authority can come from the Taxation Clause or the Foreign Commerce Clause.

Let’s grant for the moment that you’re right about that, but what is it about the statutory text of IEEPA itself? Is it simply the phrase “regulate importation,” and then the historical backdrop, from your perspective?

Squitieri: Correct. For 250 years, the phrase “regulate importation” has been understood to include tariff authority. So the ordinary reading of the statutory phrase “regulate importation” is presumed to include that authority.

A common example mi