Democratic AGs Sue White House Over New Tariffs After SCOTUS Defeat

A coalition of 24 attorneys general is suing the Trump administration in the US Court of International Trade over its move to implement new tariffs. The legal action being filed on Thursday is spearheaded by Oregon AG Dan Rayfield, along with New York’s Letitia James, California’s Rob Bonta, and Arizona’s Kris Mayes, who announced the move in a Zoom call on Thursday with members of the media.

Article I of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to impose tariffs, even though several laws passed by Congress grant the executive branch authority to impose them directly under specific circumstances, which the White House has tried to claim applies to its tariff regime.

The Trump administration has already been dealt a heavy blow on most of what it has sought to impose, with the Supreme Court ruling last month against duties that it had previously justified under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Now, rather than follow SCOTUS’s ruling and pay back the billions owed to American consumers and companies, the Trump administration is pointing to a new legal justification, citing Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose duties globally of up to 15 percent.

The attorneys general on the call say that the claim to authority under this statute is even shakier than the IEEPA argument. “No president has ever used this statute to implement tariffs,” Rayfield told reporters. “In fact, this statute has never been used at all in the history of our country.” He would go on to call the statute “archaic,” explaining that it applies to economic circumstances that are only possible when a country is on a fixed monetary exchange rate, which was the case when it was passed, but which then gave way just a few years later to the floating markets system we have today.

“A trade deficit is not a balance of payments deficit,” Kris Mayes continued, citing language in Section 122 pertaining to the latter and not the former. “The president either doesn’t know the difference or he doesn’t care. Either way he’s breaking the law again.”

Letitia James – who had previously been targeted by the White House with criminal fraud charges that wound up being dismissed – focused her comments on the damage done to American consumers: “At a time when families are already facing an affordability crisis, the last thing New Yorkers need is another round of unlawful tariffs that make life even more expensive.” New York’s top lawyer also noted that even taking the reading of Section 122 as a legitimate basis for authority, the statute also states that the president cannot be discriminatory in its application, and the White House has decided to exclude “80 pages of products” from being subject to it.

All of the attorneys general that have signed onto the legal action are Democrats, a fact that led AG Bonta to call their Republican colleagues in other states “uninterested and supine,” even as they stand to gain if this case is successful. “I think they’re secretly rooting for us, because when we deliver a victory and get tariffs struck down, their residents benefit, their businesses benefit.”