WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar: Episode 21

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about the Senate Resolution that would overturn all of President Trump’s tariffs, a court decision requiring the Trump administration to use emergency funds for to keep paying food stamps, another court decision permanently banning Trump’s order to require ID to vote, and more.

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, hear about the Senate resolution that would overturn all of President Trump's tariffs, a court decision requiring the Trump administration to use emergency funds to keep paying food stamps, another court decision permanently banning Trump's order to require ID to vote and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media. While they're covering the president's latest tweets,

who you can hear about the new legislation, executive order, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the Radar. The first piece of news I have for you this week is a joint resolution that just passed through the Senate entitled A Joint Resolution Terminating the National Emergency declared to impose global tariffs. So I talked about this on my show when it happened about six months ago in the very beginning of April. President Trump declared a national state of emergency and economic state of emergency under what's called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to executively impose tariffs,

to basically go around Congress and impose tariffs on his own. Now, it's very explicitly led out in the Constitution that the role of tariffs and taxes are given to Congress. The president is not supposed to be able to do those kind of things on his own, but the International Emergency Economic Powers Act said that basically there were some circumstances where the president might need to be able to do that, but only for a very short amount of time. So on April 2nd, President Trump declared two different economic states of national emergency. The first of which, he said, was that underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity, in our trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, meaning that other nations pose much, much higher tariffs on us than we do on them, which is mostly true.

U.S. trading partners' economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. trade deficits, and that constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States. The second declared state of emergency that President Trump made was under the same act. He claimed that he could put tariffs on China, Canada, Mexico, and Mexico, and the United States. others as merchants that hide illicit substances, including fentanyl particularly, and conceal them in shipments into the United States, or at least that they allow these things to happen. A lot of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes from China, and it comes either across the Canadian border or the Mexican border. And so that was the other state of emergency that President Trump

declared in order to be able to impose these tariffs without going through Congress. Now, the way that the International Economic Emergency Act is written, the national emergency that's declared is supposed to be temporary. It's supposed to be short. It's supposed to be objective and it's supposed to be temporary. So written into the bill, it says that not later than six months after a national emergency is declared, which would be this month, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated. So that's what just happened in the Senate. On October 30th, the Senate passed a joint resolution that resolves to terminate both national emergencies declared by President Trump on April 2nd. Now, you might be surprised as I was to hear that

the Senate would actually pass this. Generally speaking, votes in the Senate because of the filibuster need 60 votes in order to gain passage. However, joint resolutions do not. You only need a majority, and they got the majority for this joint resolution. Now, there are 51 senators that voted in support of this. They basically voted to end the tariffs that Trump has been imposing. That would include all 45 Democratic senators, both independent senators, which one of those is Bernie Sanders. They're both very much left-wing independents. And four Republican senators, those would be Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Arkansas, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky. Now, it's worth noting that Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have both been known to vote with Democrats,

much more than most of the other Republican senators. So it's not necessarily a surprise to see the two of them do this. However, to see Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul get on board with something like this is a bit more surprising, especially Mitch McConnell, because Rand Paul is known for being a fiscal hawk. That's what he's about. He's a free trade advocate. So in principle, it makes complete sense that he's, would be against tariffs like this, but it is an anomaly to see a senator, especially during government shutdown when Republicans are so united against the Democrats, and in a year overall where congressional Republicans have been extremely supportive of the president's agenda, it is an anomaly to see a senator go against the grain and vote with Democrats to get them

the necessary vote that they needed to pass this joint resolution. Now, here's the future of this joint resolution. According to the wording of the bill, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the joint resolution must now be introduced in the House of Representatives within the next three days, where they will then bring it to a vote. Now, I think there's a very good chance that this resolution also passes the House of Representatives. It's going to have some Republican support, particularly among the more libertarian fiscal conservative types. But like any other bill or resolution that goes through the Houses of Congress, it is subject to the presidential veto, which means that most likely President Trump will veto this resolution as soon as it gets to his desk, and they have the opportunity to vote again to try to overcome the veto.

To do that, each chamber of Congress would need a two-thirds majority in order to pass the House resolution and override the presidential veto. Considering this passed in the Senate 5147, it seems extremely unlikely that they're going to get 67 votes to pass this joint resolution in the Senate or the two-thirds that would be needed to pass it in the house in that same way. So if that ends up being the fate of this joint resolution, the declared national emergency would expire on its own, within a year. So it would expire on April 2, 26, unless President Trump were to submit a notice to

Congress saying that he plans to renew the state of emergency for another year, which I have no doubt he would do, because that gives him the power to be able to personally oversee and determine each one of these specific tariffs that he's imposing on other countries. So the last thing to note about this is, it's a lot more likely that the tariffs get overturned by the Supreme Court than they do by this joint resolution. There's all sorts of people who are freaking out online right now, all sorts of journalists who are capitalizing on this moment seeing, wow, the Senate is opposing President Trump, immediately all of the tariffs are going to be overturned. That's just not necessarily true. It is possible that they are overturned and deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

But all the people who are reacting right now and assuming that the Senate has just overturned all of President Trump's tariffs, which it has not yet done, and I don't think it will do, could cause real problems. Because when consumers and when investors are unsure of what the future of the markets are going to be, whether they're will. be these extra prices that come through tariffs, whether there will be these extra charges to import certain goods. All of that makes a difference when you're looking at your expectations for the future of the economy, and that changes behavior. This joint resolution seems unlikely to pass all the way through and override the presidential veto that President Trump would

almost certainly give to it, meaning that the tariffs are likely to stay in place unless they're overturned by the Supreme Court, which we should be hearing about in the next month or so. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a court case, or two separate court cases for that matter, which were both just decided on October 31st, that the Trump administration must continue to pay for SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as the food stamps program. The rulings by both of these federal judges required that the federal government use its emergency reserve funds during the government shutdown to keep the food aid program going. Now, under the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was planning. to freeze payments to the SNAP program starting on November 1st because it said it couldn't keep financing it during the shutdown. Now, their argument essentially is that not only do we not have a fiscal year 2026 budget and we are now a full month into fiscal year 2026. We don't yet have a fiscal

year 2026 budget and we don't even have a continuing resolution that extends the fiscal year 2025 budget. And so the Trump administration and particularly the Department of Agriculture is saying that we have no funds appropriated to SNAP for this year. And so they're making the argument that the food aid programs in the United States cost $190 billion a year. SNAP specifically costs about $113 billion a year. So this is an expensive program to fund when you haven't actually decided the budget yet. Now, practically speaking, that sounds like it makes a lot of sense, but when it comes to the legal reality, the judges are absolutely right in this case.

According to the way that the Congressional budget system works, there's mandatory spending and there's discretionary spending. spending. At this point, about two-thirds of all governmental spending, about two-thirds of our federal budget that was about $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025, is mandatory spending. And those mandatory spending programs are things like Social Security, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or food stamps. The other third of congressional spending is what's called discretionary spending, and that's what changes year by year. So when they're shutting the government down over the fiscal year 2026 budget, what they're really doing is fighting over the one-third

of government spending. They're fighting over the discretionary spending because that's what changes year to year. When it comes to the mandatory spending, the Social Security, the Medicare, all those kinds of things. Those are mandatory. They continue to run and fluctuate depending on how many people are using the programs. They are not year by year programs. And so when it comes to the government shutdown, it really has nothing to do with mandatory spending in which the food aid program is included. So there's no real legal basis for the Trump administration to argue that the government shutdown means that they're not required to spend that money because they are. So these judges both ruled that the Trump administration is not only not allowed to put a pause

on the SNAP program. They're actually required to use any contingency funds that they have to keep funding the program. The program is not going to be shut down. Now, the flimsyness of the arguments of the Trump administration in these court cases leads me to think that they're actually doing this as leverage in the government shutdown. If they can at least delay the SNAP program, that might give them some leverage over the Democrats to try to bring them to the table.

end the government shutdown to continue funding the government and start to work on an actual budget for the fiscal year that we're a full month into at this point. In the same way that I talked about last week, the Democrats were using pay for federal workers as leverage on their side. So both sides are kind of leveraging things that they really shouldn't be leveraging at this point. But there's been one more major thing to come out of this case, which is that people are actually now taking a serious look at the SNAP program. So as people take a closer look at the program, they're really beginning to see how much fraud, misuse, and abuse is really going on here. About one in eight Americans are on the SNAP program, which adds up to over 42 million people that are monthly

receiving food stamps. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture is saying that about $12 billion a year is stolen from the food stamps program. Not only that, but there are too many examples for me to show of videos going viral on the internet. You can find 100 of them very, very quickly and easily on X, of people boasting about how they have committed. food stamps fraud, how they've lied about how many children they had or lied about their marital status because you are more likely to qualify if you're separated from your spouse. People have quit jobs in order to qualify for the program. People are selling their food stamps. They're using food stamps to buy handbags to buy expensive nail treatments. I mean, you can find hundreds of these

videos. And yes, they're anecdotal, but they're pointing people to a sign of an underlying problem of misuse of the program. And that's been the biggest thing that's come out of this court case that has just been incited against the Trump administration. So even though they are being required to pay out the fullness of the SNAP benefits, which they are legally required to do, this could have the consequence of leading to structural changes to the program in the future to try to prevent some of this fraud and abuse. You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio for Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is another court case. This time, the Trump administration being sued over an executive order that aimed to implement a proof of citizenship

requirement on federal voting forms. So on March 25th of this year, President Trump issued the executive order in question here called preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections, which did a few different things. First, it required that when people register to vote, they provide documentary proof of United States citizenship. This could be a United States passport, any other kind of real ID, a driver's license, a military identification card, anything like that. The other major thing that the executive order did was require that only the mail-in ballots that are received by election day be counted in the federal elections, which was an attempt to overrule the policy of some states where you could count mail-in ballots that were sent in up to two weeks after election day. But the one that's relevant for this court case, the one that's being challenged, is the one that would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in order to vote.

Now, the first major thing to note about this case is who the plaintiff is. The group that brought this case against the Trump administration was the Democratic, National Committee, the DNC. So the DNC claimed to be so harmed by this executive order that they had enough standing to bring a case against the Trump administration in the courts to try to prevent proof of U.S. citizenship in order to be able to vote. So on October 31st, U.S. District Court judge Colleen Kalar-Kateli in Washington, D.C., sided with the DNC, and permanently blocked the part of the executive order that would require proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote. This judge issued a permanent blockage of this rule, citing the Constitution, say,

that the Elections Clause of the United States Constitution gives the rights of determining the Times, places, and manner of holding elections to the states and not to the president. The reason that they did this in the Constitution was if, let's say you had a president who's sitting in office and he can unilaterally change the election policy, he could then by himself alter the times, places, and manners of state elections in a way that would help him to get reelected or help his party to get elected, that kind of thing. It could throw off the balance of power. It could throw off free. elections. So it makes sense as to why they would put that clause in the Constitution. And this clause is what

the U.S. District Court judge cited when permanently blocking the Trump executive order that would require an ID or proof of citizenship in order to be able to vote. Now, there are two questions that immediately come to mind as a result of this. First of all, it's almost hard to believe that we don't have voter ID codified into legislation yet. Like, that just doesn't exist in American law. You do not have to show proof of ID, proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. Now, there are a lot of states that require voter ID, and that was the power given to the states to determine their particular elections. That was the power given to them in the Constitution. But under federal law, Congress has passed nothing to codify voter ID. In August 2025, a Pew Research Center survey found that 83% of

U.S. adults said they support requiring all voters to show a government issued photo ID to vote. That's almost an impossible consensus. You can't get 83% of Americans to agree on any political policy. And they did in this particular scenario. And Pew Research Center is one of the most widely respected and not right-leaning by any means, holsters that you can find. In spite of that, and in spite of the fact that there is a citizenship requirement to vote mandate that passed through the House of Representatives last year and can't get through the Senate because it can't pass the filibuster. They can't get 60 votes in the Senate. They can't get seven Democrats to agree on passing a citizenship mandate to vote. The second question that comes to mind as a response to this case is, how did the Democratic National Committee show that they had standing to sue in this particular case?

This is a reminder, standing in legal terms means that you can prove that you are actively being harmed by the actions or policies of the defendant. And so in this case, the DNC is claiming that they have standing, that they can prove that they were harmed by the Trump administration's executive order. And I would like to know how they prove that. The only argument that I could see them making to have standing is the fact that, well, a president changing federal election law, and in this case requiring people to be a citizen in order to vote, could mean that our endorsed candidates and, our nominated candidates get less votes. It could have a disparate impact on Democrats if only citizens are allowed to vote. Take from that what you will, but that's almost an open statement that non-citizens are a big enough part of their voter base for them to be harmed by this, which is not

illegal as it stands in the United States, but that is part of their party's strategy and coalition, and it's in opposition to the will of 83% of American voters. Voter ID seems to be something that almost everybody supports, and there seems to be no way to really get it through, either legislatively or executively at this time. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a presidential memorandum issued October 29th, 2025 entitled President Donald Trump brings home more billion-dollar deals during a state visit to the Republic of Korea. So this past week, President Trump took a trip over to Korea, where he negotiated and made

some deals with the Korean government and Korean private and public businesses over there, with the goal of, quote, including initiatives to support American jobs, further America's energy dominance, promote American leadership in the technology revolution, and build our maritime partnership. When it comes down to it, from these deals, the United States is getting security to access to minerals and refineries for minerals that are not subject to U.S. environmental laws. So they'll be able to do all their refining without paying all the extra costs that are involved in the U.S. environmental laws by refining in Korea. They keep the supply chain of minerals going. They also, through these deals, we're able to provide more American jobs or support more American jobs.

working with American companies to promise certain sales to the Korean state, to the Korean Air Force, and to Korean private companies. Now, what Korea gets out of this is American technologies. If America has a mineral pipeline going through Korea, that's going to make America much more likely to offer military support as well. So it offers some kind of securities. And they lock in prices for these technological things that they're purchasing, for this equipment that they're purchasing. They're locking in prices now so that as the prices inflate over time, as they naturally do, those prices will be locked in over the next few years as well, so that makes it a good deal for the Koreans. Now, it seems like both sides are getting good things out of this deal, but I also wanted to point out that a lot of your favorite U.S., quote-unquote, private companies are a lot more entangled with the government than we'd like to think.

For example, the deal between the U.S. and the Republic of Korea here works with private companies in both nations to expand collaboration on AI, 6G Internet, which I know I've talked about on this show before. Amazon is committed through this deal to invest $5 billion in South Korea's cloud infrastructure. NASA is going to deploy a Korean satellite. Boeing and General Electric are now in contract with the Korean government through the middleman of the United States government. There were maritime partnership investments from Hyundai, Cerberus, Hunwa Ocean, and many other American companies. Not to mention the U.S. government securing multi-billion dollar deals for its domestic

private companies through this deal. So all these policies are going to have downstream. effects on private companies, jobs, revenue, mineral access, production, all that kind of stuff. But the government is working a lot more closely with these private companies in America and in other countries than sometimes we realize. The last piece of news I have for you this week has to do with the government shutdown. And in the context of the government shutdown, I want to tell you a little bit about what the Senate is actually doing, what the Senate is actually voting on and discussing while all this

stuff is going on. So you've seen all the clips going around. They're hard to avoid at this point of various Senate. various representatives, complaining about the other side, not being willing to come to the table. There's a lot of talks about the budget and how we're working to try to negotiate with the other side. So I just want to list some of the things that the Senate has passed as resolutions just in the last week or two. These are things that were introduced, discussed, and agreed to passed by vote in the Senate. For example, a resolution designating November 1st, 2025 as National Bison Day.

A resolution designating October 2025 is National Country Music Month. A resolution designating November 1st, designating October 2025 National Dyslexia Awareness Month. So now October 2025 is National Country Music Month, National Dislexia Awareness Month, National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and National Energy Dominance Month. So quite the month we've got going on in October 2025. We also have a resolution expressing support for the designation of the week of October 24th to October 31st as Bat Week. We have that same week being designated as National Chemistry Week. Another resolution designating the week beginning October 19th as National Character Counts Week. So there's dozens of these. I could keep going on and on. And there's nothing wrong with this per se, but I mean, this is what the Senate is actually doing right now. So when

they're complaining about the other side not negotiating, when they're complaining about the government not being opened, when they're complaining about the fact that we're in a month-long government shutdown, I think it's worth noting the fact that the Senate is really discussing these other kinds of things, and they're discussing dozens of them. It's not like one of them just slipped through here and there. And I'm sure they have good reasons for introducing these kinds of resolutions, and they're not bad things by any means, but for all the complaints that they have about federal workers not being paid, and the supplemental nutrition assistance program funds running out, and all these various things that are effects of the government shutdown, it seems like they

sure are using a lot of time and energy to decide which week it is and which month it is. So to recap this week, we had the Senate joint resolution to overturn Trump's tariffs, along with all sorts of other resolutions. We had two court cases, one requiring the Trump administration to pay snap benefits during the government shutdown and the other permanently blocking the president's attempts to mandate voter ID. And we had a presidential memorandum announcing major deals between the U.S. and Korea. Tune in next week for more. Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and I want to thank you for listening and encourage you to tune back in next time for more coverage of the news that fell under the radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale

101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller. Here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.