Court of International Trade

The Trump administration is ramping up legal action against alleged tariff evaders through direct enforcement of trade laws as well as more novel use of the False Claims Act, further raising uncertainty for importers dealing with shifting tariff rates and exemptions, former Commerce and Justice department lawyers said during a webinar on Tuesday. “There's just a lot of uncertainty, and uncertainty can breed investigations and compliance risk,” Burden Walker, a former deputy assistant attorney general who’s now a partner at...

Democrats in Congress and the Washington state government are pushing the Supreme Court to strike down President Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs on separation-of-powers grounds, claiming that allowing the duties to stand would allow the president to seize “core” legislative powers in defiance of the constitution. “Only Congress, not the President, has the power to ‘lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,’ and Congress cannot delegate those powers to the President. The President’s exercise of power here...

A group of Democratic state attorneys general told the Supreme Court on Monday that “common sense” shows President Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs are illegal, arguing in a final written brief ahead of a November hearing that context, history and constitutional principles all show that the duties exceed IEEPA’s authority to “regulate” imports. “Every significant piece of context points in the same direction here. IEEPA does not use the terms that Congress typically uses to authorize tariffs, and...

The Court of International Trade is refusing to lift its stay on litigation over President Trump’s executive orders that wound down the de minimis tariff exemption for packages worth $800 or less, electing instead to keep the suit on hold until the Supreme Court decides related challenges over the administration’s “emergency” duties on most U.S. trading partners. Late on Oct. 20, a three-judge CIT panel entered an order in the de minimis suit rejecting a request by the plaintiff, a...

A Supreme Court decision in favor of President Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs would give the executive “unlimited” power to set, revoke and change tariff rates with no meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress, plaintiffs argued Monday in their final round of written briefs for the litigation. “If the IEEPA tariffs are upheld, this and future Presidents would ‘enjoy virtually unlimited power to rewrite’ U.S. tariff laws -- by adding, increasing, or decreasing taxes on imports --...

States, private companies and individuals challenging President Trump’s “emergency” tariffs are asking the Supreme Court to give each set of plaintiffs a chance to present their own arguments at a hotly anticipated Nov. 5 hearing, setting up what would be a complex, five-way proceeding if the justices grant every pending request. Splitting argument among the separate groups of plaintiffs “will ensure that the various interests are adequately represented before the Court. It will also ensure that the fundamentally important statutory...