The Justice Department scrambled on Thursday to defend the legality of President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, just one day before he is set to expand his highly contested global trade war with new duties on America’s closest trading partners
The arguments in a federal appeals court underscored the financial stakes for U.S. importers — and the legal risks for the White House — as the Trump administration prepares to impose higher rates and implement new trade deals without the explicit approval of Congress.
The legal saga began this spring when a group of businesses and a coalition of states each sued the Trump administration on grounds that the president had vastly overstepped his authorities in the design of some of his steepest tariffs. A federal trade court agreed, determining in May that Mr. Trump did not have “unbounded” powers to impose duties as he saw fit.
The trade court ordered the White House to unwind those taxes on imports. But the Justice Department quickly appealed and soon secured a temporary halt to the mandate, allowing the president’s tariffs to remain in place. Lawyers for the Trump administration had argued that an abrupt end to the president’s policies would have sowed chaos and undermined its negotiations to broker more favorable trade agreements around the world.
The administration has since forged ahead with its plan to impose steep new tariffs on dozens of countries on Friday. The threat of significant duties helped Mr. Trump broker preliminary trade agreements with several other countries, including the European Union and Japan, both of which face tariffs of 15 percent on their exports to America.
But the underlying legal questions surrounding his strategy — and the extent to which the president can wage a limitless trade war — remain for the courts to determine. The hearing on Thursday, convened by a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, marks a key step in what will surely be a fight that lands at the Supreme Court.
Brett A. Shumate, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, opened oral arguments on Thursday by stressing that “Congress has long given the president broad discretion” to confront national emergencies, including the nation’s trade imbalances.
But Mr. Shumate at times faced an icy reception from some of the appellate judges. They repeatedly pressed him over Mr. Trump’s attempts to subject much of the world’s exports to steep duties using an economic emergency law that does not explicitly mention the word tariff.
Still, Mr. Shumate maintained that the law allows the president “to take extraordinary action,” while arguing that the courts could not second guess Mr. Trump over his declarations of a national emergency.
In the end, the courts could uphold or strike down not only Mr. Trump’s tariffs but possibly his trade deals, which in many cases would reduce, but not eliminate, the levies he has imposed on major trading partners.
Neal K. Katyal, the former solicitor general who argued Thursday on behalf of businesses that initiated the tariff lawsuit, said Mr. Trump had asserted a “breathtaking claim to power that no president has asserted in 200 years.”
For now, the legal uncertainty casts a long shadow over Mr. Trump as he prepares to drastically expand the use of tariffs on America’s trading partners. Some of the president’s forthcoming duties have been suspended and revised repeatedly since April, when he first promised them on “Liberation Day,” but Mr. Trump has steadfastly refused this week to postpone his deadline again.
“If our Country was not able to protect itself by using TARIFFS AGAINST TARIFFS, WE WOULD BE ‘DEAD,’ WITH NO CHANCE OF SURVIVAL OR SUCCESS,” Mr. Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Thursday, referring to the lawsuits as “America’s big case.”
Generally, it is Congress, not the president, that has the power to impose tariffs, except in limited cases outlined by law. That includes the power to issue tariffs for national security purposes, which Mr. Trump has done with his duties on imported cars and steel, and with his new threats to tax pharmaceuticals and semiconductor imports.
But Mr. Trump has sought to apply some of the most painful duties in a novel way, by tapping the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law known as IEEPA that no president has ever used to impose tariffs. Congress explicitly enacted that law to rein in the president’s authority over trade, though Mr. Trump and his aides claim that it affords them sweeping powers to impose tariffs anyway.
To justify his strategy, Mr. Trump has cited an evolving set of crises he must contain, including the flow of fentanyl into the United States and the country’s persistent trade deficit with other nations.
Tariffs are taxes applied to foreign goods, and their financial impact could fall hardest on American businesses and consumers. In recent weeks, major businesses including Stanley Black & Decker and Tesla have warned investors about the potential hit they may face from the president’s duties while others, like Adidas, have said they might need to raise prices as a result.
The rising costs have prompted some affected companies — from an auto parts manufacturer in Detroit to an educational toy company in Illinois — to file a series of legal challenges against Mr. Trump in a bid to halt his trade policies.
The widening roster of lawsuits underscores how some businesses have been “hammered” financially, said Andrew Morris, a senior litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a legal group with past ties to the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. The organization is representing plaintiffs in two other tariff lawsuits, one of which was filed in Texas earlier this month.
Some of those fights are in their earliest stages, or they have been paused until the appeals court can determine the fate of the key tariff cases that the Trump administration lost back in the spring.
“It’s hitting us as consumers, it’s destabilizing our business and it’s weakening our economy all at the same time, and they’re doing it on the backs of us,” said Dan Rayfield, the Democratic attorney general of Oregon, before arguments began. He is leading a coalition of 12 states in a lawsuit alleging that the tariffs are illegal and have hurt their budgets.
The states’ case has been consolidated on appeal with the similarly successful lawsuit brought by the Liberty Justice Center on behalf of businesses including VOS Selections, a wine importer in New York.
Benjamin Gutman, the solicitor general for Oregon, told the appeals court on Thursday that the president has other powers at his disposal that allow him to apply tariffs to address issues including nation’s trade deficit. Each of those laws, however, limits the size and scope of the duties that Mr. Trump could pursue.
“The president can negotiate deals,” said Jeffrey Schwab, the interim litigation director for the Liberty Justice Center. “He’s just got to get congressional approval.”
Even before oral arguments began, the legal battle had already attracted significant attention, illustrating the stakes for the economy as Mr. Trump looks to reconfigure the global trading order on a claim of sweeping presidential power.
A wide array of economists — including Jason Furman and N. Gregory Mankiw, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively — banded together to tell the court that Mr. Trump had wrongly cited the trade deficit as an emergency warranting his novel use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA.
The America First Policy Institute, a group that Mr. Trump’s allies created, took the opposite view, warning that a ruling against the president would “eviscerate” his foreign policy and “deprive America of hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue.”
Business lobbying groups also intervened, pleading with judges to strike down the heart of the president’s trade war. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the Consumer Technology Association, whose board includes executives from major tech companies, in arguing that the president’s tariffs are “increasing their costs, undermining their ability to plan for the future and in some cases threatening their very existence.”
“If IEEPA can be used to adjust tariffs, there’s absolutely no limitations as to what could be done,” said Neil Bradley, the executive vice president of the chamber. “And that’s a grant of tariff authority we don’t think Congress ever intended.”
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
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