The Trump administration was sued by 25 Democratic-led states over the president’s latest round of global tariffs, arguing that it was trying to use a different legal authority to resurrect a policy the Supreme Court had struck down.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York on Monday, targeting last month’s round of global tariffs against 59 countries and the European Union on the grounds that they didn’t do enough to prevent imports using forced labor. The Monday lawsuit, led by New York, argued that the new round of tariffs was “arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law.”
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“The Plaintiff States oppose forced labor in all its forms and support protections for workers around the globe. But the Administration cannot use forced labor as a pretext to continue its illegal tariff scheme. The tariffs the [U.S. trade representative] imposed are so broad that they defy the USTR’s own stated aims and make a mockery of the statute used to justify them,” the lawsuit said.
The narrow spread of tariff rates and the clumping of such a broad range of state economies into just four groups, it argued, “strongly suggest no real relationship between the purportedly unreasonable practices of every substantial United States trading partner and the tariff rates the USTR is imposing on them.”
The White House stood by its tariffs.
“The United States is using its lawful authority to obtain the elimination of unreasonable acts, policies, and practices that burden U.S. commerce,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Associated Press. “A foreign country’s failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor is unreasonable and burdens U.S. commerce, including American workers, and must be addressed. Section 301 tariffs have proven to be a legally durable tool since the President’s first term, and they remain so now.”
CANADA IS CHOKING AMERICA. TRUMP IS RIGHT TO MAKE THEM PAY
The lawsuit included Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said, “After losing at the Supreme Court, the administration is once again trying to illegally raise taxes on families and businesses with a new round of tariffs.”
