A coalition of 25 U.S. states have launched lawsuits against the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump over the latest round of tariffs.
The Trump administration launched sweeping Section 301 tariffs on 60 economies in July, comprising 59 countries and every country in the European Union. The United States Trade Representative (USTR) launched the tariffs following investigations into all 60 economies, and said the tariffs are related to those economies failures to “impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”
Those tariffs hit virtually every product from the economies in question, including a wide swath of seafood products, with a 10 percent to 12.5 percent duty.
In response to the new tariffs 25 states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virgina, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin – have joined together to sue the administration to stop the tariffs.
“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,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release. “No matter how the administration tries to justify it, the law and our constitution are clear that the president does not have the power to impose sweeping tariffs on whatever countries he wants. I will continue to stand up to this administration’s illegal policies that threaten to raise costs for New Yorkers.”
James and New York Governor Kathy Hochul both said in the release that Section 301 tariffs are normally only implemented after complex investigations that take up to a year, and the investigations into 60 separate economies was extremely rapid and didn’t satisfy the requirements necessary to justify tariffs.
“Instead, the administration is using ‘forced labor’ as an excuse to continue its policy of indiscriminately enacting damaging tariffs on a wide range of countries,” a release from the New York Attorney General’s office states. “The lawsuit explains that a previous investigation into Brazil for its digital trade, tariff, and anti-corruption enforcement policies, which resulted in a tariff proposal in June 2018, took nearly a year. A similar investigation into China lasted more than eight months. In this case, the administration claims to have investigated the policies and economies of 60 trading partners in less than three months in order to justify its tariffs.”
The lawsuit itself also points out that the tariffs are applied equally to countries with and without mechanisms to prevent the use of forced labor, and are applied equally to both raw materials and to finished goods, regardless of how likely they are to be involved in any labor rights abuses.
“The lawsuit explains that USTR failed to engage with testimony from countries and comments submitted during the shortened development of these tariffs, which overwhelmingly contradicted the administration’s claims that the tariffs would address the harms of forced labor,” the New York Attorney General’s office states.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the Section 301 tariffs are pretextual and not targeted in any way to address any of the harms they were supposedly enacted for.
“President Trump is so intent on raising the cost of living for Americans that he is willing to break law after law after law to do so,” Bonta said. “This is President Trump’s third attempt to illegally impose tariffs that would make life more expensive for American families and small businesses, and this is the third time we're taking the Administration to court over this misuse of power.”
The lawsuit from 25 states comes after a separate lawsuit was launched by the Liberty Justice Center, the same law firm that successfully argued against Trump’s first set of sweeping tariffs, making many of the same arguments as the lawsuit launched by the U.S. states.
