“The President claims the power to impose, reduce, hike, suspend, double, treble, or eliminate tariffs all on his own. That’s just not the law, and the D.C. Circuit should say so.”
—Zac Morgan, WLF Senior Litigation Counsel

Click here to read WLF’s brief.

(Washington, DC)—Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) today asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to affirm a lower court decision enjoining tariffs imposed by President Trump in Learning Resources v. Trump.

The case arises from a series of executive orders that claim the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as a legal basis to impose tariffs. Those orders have been challenged by a host of plaintiffs across the United States. In one of those cases, the toy manufacturer Learning Resources prevailed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which held that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.

As WLF’s amicus brief explains, that opinion should be affirmed. The President has no inherent constitutional authority to impose tariffs, and so he must rely on Congressional authorization to do so. But IEEPA, a nearly 50-year-old statute that no other President has used to justify tariffs, does not mention tariffs in its text at all. The President’s strained reading to the contrary is of a piece with earlier Executive Branch overreaches halted by the Supreme Court, such as President Biden’s effort to cancel student loan debt and President Obama’s effort to create a carbon cap-and-trade program through the EPA.

In short, the President claims a roving right to unilaterally set taxes on America’s multi-trillion-dollar portion of the international marketplace and to alter those rates whenever he sees fit. As WLF’s brief notes, it is highly unlikely “that Congress, well-aware of the importance of regulatory and taxation certainty to America’s business community, would have given the President unbridled whipsaw authority on such a major question.”