And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the shift in thinking on the right or when it happened, why it happened, how the right went from being skeptical of executive authority to sort of embracing it and the consequences of that shift.

So, yeah, I think there's these two thinkers, conservative thinkers who articulate these great defenses of Congress and in the 1950s.

So I'm thinking of James Burnham's Congress in the American Tradition, which is a really great book.

And, uh, Wilmore Kendall's various writings, but especially the two majorities, um, which, which he, I think penned in, in about 1960.

Um, I think conservatives at that moment had this really great sense of how Congress embodied the manliness in a way that's very much informed my thinking that I've shared with you.

So it was there and maybe in some ways it was a natural conservative view.

I think, of course, part of that was conservatives from the South.

And here, in plain view, is the dysfunction of Congress made manifest.

What is Section th- 232? Why is it so important here in the 21st century?

Well, I think this was another law meant to facilitate presidential expansion of free trade.

But this one does contain this clause, Section 232, which gives the president power to slap on tariffs that he says are necessary to protect national security.

So you can, you can imagine, uh, in a Cold War context, Congress wanted to make sure that, that a free trade agreement w- wouldn't jeopardize America's safety in some ways.

And, and, and giving the president the power to, to protect the inf- interests of the nation.

Um, you know, I, I'm not a, I'm not a full expert on exactly how this has been used over the years, but, uh, I think it mostly lay fallow for a while.

Uh, it wasn't, it wasn't the, it wasn't the engine of, of, of big tariffs.

Oh, International Economic-

What the heck was that, Phil? Good evening to you.

Nice to talk to you, John.

Um, basically, the, the point here is that when Congress starts making trade law, right in the early days of our republic, it gives a role to the president.

And it's not just that the president needs to, uh, have some customs agent out in the port cities who can do the enforcement, it's that actually Congress passes a law such that the president can make a finding that changes what kind of tariffs we're going to have at all.

So they're trying to navigate the very tricky diplomatic landscape of the Napo- Napoleonic Wars, where both the British and the French are, are, are preying on American shipping at various times.

And so they passed some laws at the end of the Jefferson administration and into the early years of the Madison administration, where they give the president a role to decide a- a- are the British or the French behaving better now? If you determine yes, then our tariff policy will change.

What did he do about the fact that Congress had taken charge of the tariffs?

Well, I would say, F- FDR, eh, was a man of many contradictions.

More of this tonight.

I would say F- FDR, eh, was a man of many contradictions, but he did run in 1932 a- as somebody who was gonna bring freer trade as one antidote to America's economic woes, and he delivered on that.

He appointed as Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, uh, who was a, a principled free trader who had been an opponent of, of the earlier rounds of tariffs.

And the Democratic Congress of 1933 moved pretty quickly to empower FDR as their way of lowering tariffs.

They said, "We have dirty hands here in Congress.

We know that we as legislators have all these parochial interests that pe- that we've been looking out for too much.

We need to have the president act on behalf of the national interests to negotiate better deals for the American people." And so over the course of his, you know, three-plus terms in office, FDR was empowered to do this by Congress and he did negotiate many of these deals.