The U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday evening struck down President Donald Trump’s use of emergency executive powers to impose tariffs on nearly all imports.
The ruling includes an injunction that immediately blocks the collection of tariffs Trump imposed under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. The Trump administration had used that law as the legal basis for tariffs imposed in February on imports from Canada, China, and Mexico, then used it again as the basis for the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs announced on April 2 and applying to nearly all American imports.
The court ruled that Trump had overstepped the authority granted by IEEPA, which had never previously been invoked to impose tariffs.
“The court holds…that IEEPA does not authorize any of the Worldwide, Retaliatory, or Trafficking Tariff Orders,” a three-judge panel on the court wrote. Those orders, the judges wrote, “exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs.”
“The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently
enjoined,” they concluded.
The ruling combines two cases that challenged the legal authority of Trump’s tariffs. One of those cases was brought by the Liberty Justice Center on behalf of several American businesses that depend on imported goods. (Reason interviewed one of the plaintiffs in the case shortly after it was filed in April.) The other was filed by several state attorneys general.
The court’s ruling is a sweeping one that covers all imports. “There is no question here of narrowly tailored relief,” the three judges wrote in their ruling. “If the challenged Tariff Orders are unlawful as to Plaintiffs they are unlawful as to all.”
The ruling is a welcome blow to the Trump administration’s freewheeling use of IEEPA in ways that seemingly ignored the plain text of the law—which authorizes executive action only in response to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to the United States. Ordinary imports to the country do not meet that standard, the plaintiffs argued in the case. Additionally, the plaintiffs argued that Congress could not constitutionally delegate such sweeping tariff powers to the executive branch.
In its ruling on Wednesday, the Court of International Trade seemed to agree on both points.
“We do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President,” the judges wrote. “We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers.”
The Trump administration will almost certainly appeal the ruling and request a stay of the injunction on the tariffs. It’s impossible to say how those things will turn out.
For now, however, this is a huge win for free trade—and, perhaps more importantly, Wednesday’s ruling is a win for the rule of law and the separation of powers.
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