Saying Trump exceeded his authority, 12 states ask court to strike down his sweeping tariffs

Twelve states on Wednesday urged a federal court to strike down President Donald Trump's sweeping taxes on imports, saying he had exceeded his authority, left U.S. trade policy dependent on his whims and unleashed economic chaos.

They are challenging tariffs that Trump imposed last month on most of the countries in the world in an effort to reverse America's massive and longstanding trade deficits. They are also targeting levies the president had earlier plastered on imports from Canada, China and Mexico to combat the illegal flow of immigrants and the synthetic opioids across the U.S. border.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York on Wednesday heard arguments in the states’ case. Last week, the trade court held a hearing in a similar challenge to Trump’s tariffs brought by five small businesses.

The court specifically deals with civil lawsuits involving international trade. Its decisions can be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington and ultimately to the Supreme Court, where the legal challenges to Trump’ tariffs are widely expected to end up.

At least seven lawsuits are challenging the levies, the centerpiece of Trump's trade policy.

Declaring that the United States’ trade deficits add up to a national emergency, Trump invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEPPA) and rolled out 10% tariffs on many countries on April 2 — "Liberation Day,'' he called it. He imposed stiffer “reciprocal’’ tariffs of up to 50% on countries that sell more goods to the United States than the U.S. sells them. (Trump later suspended those higher tariffs for 90 days.)

The states argue that the emergency economic powers act does not authorize the use of tariffs. Even if it did, they say, the trade deficit does not meet the law's requirement that an emergency be triggered only by an “unusual and extraordinary threat.'' The U.S. has run a trade deficit with the rest of the world for 49 consecutive years. “This is not an unusual problem,’’ Brian Marshall, an Oregon state attorney, told the judges Wednesday.

The Trump administration argues that courts approved President Richard Nixon’s emergency use of tariffs in a 1971 economic crisis. The Nixon administration successfully cited its authority under the 1917 Trading With Enemy Act, which preceded and supplied some of the language used in IEPPA.

Brett Shumate, the assistant U.S. attorney general representing the administration, argued Wednesday that only Congress, and not the courts, can determine the “political'' question of whether the president's rationale for declaring an emergency complies with the law. That argument led Judge Jane Restani to ask if courts were helpless to block the president's emergency declarations no matter how ”crazy'' they were.

Trump's Liberation Day tariffs shook global financial markets and led many economists to downgrade the outlook for U.S. economic growth. So far, though, the tariffs appear to have had little impact on the world's largest economy.

The 12 states pursuing the case are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont.