By Dietrich Knauth
NEW YORK, Sept 30 (Reuters) – The US Court of International Trade is hearing a challenge on Wednesday to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods from 60 trading partners he accuses of failing to prevent imports made with forced labor, a policy opponents say revives the unchecked tariff power the Supreme Court struck down in February.
Four small businesses and 25 Democratic-led states argue the tariffs, which apply to goods from the EU and China, far exceed the president’s authority.
Pratik Shah, an attorney representing two small businesses that sued over the tariffs, told the court that the Trump administration has misused a law that offers only a “carefully constrained” tariff authority. In its rush to impose new tariffs, the Trump administration skipped the legal requirements to make country-specific findings that each of the tariffs was justified, Shah said.
“If you’re going to do it at breakneck speed and try to cover the entire globe, you still have to satisfy the statutory requirements,” Shah said.
A panel of three judges appointed by Presidents Trump, Barack Obama and Joe Biden is currently hearing arguments in the case. The panel is expected to issue a written ruling sometime after the hearing.
Trump has made tariffs a central pillar of his foreign policy, using them as leverage to negotiate trade deals around the globe. But the Supreme Court ruled against most of Trump’s widest-ranging tariffs on February 20, finding that the president cannot use emergency economic powers to unilaterally impose tariffs on all US trading partners.
Trump responded by immediately imposing a temporary 10% global tariff under a different US law. When those temporary tariffs expired, he invoked another legal authority to impose the forced labor tariffs now being challenged.
The tariffs, imposed in late July, range from 10% to 12.5% and cover more than 99% of goods imported into the United States.
Three lawsuits, consolidated in the US Court of International Trade in New York, argue that the new tariffs require country-specific findings about unfair trade practices to be legally justified. Rather than conducting any real investigation into forced labor, Trump is simply using “forced labor” as a pretext to revive his claim to an unfettered global tariff power that US courts have repeatedly rejected, according to the lawsuits.
The Trump administration argued in court papers that it had conducted real investigations into other nations’ failure to prevent imports of goods produced with forced labor, and concluded that tariffs were warranted for each of the 60 investigated trading partners.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Sanjeev Miglani and Nick Zieminski)
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