California Governor Gavin Newsom makes an announcement at a news conference at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles on March 26.Damian Dovarganes/The Associated Press
California Governor Gavin Newsom is suing the White House over its use of emergency measures to impose tariffs, marking the highest-profile challenge yet of one of the central powers U.S. President Donald Trump has exercised in his return to his office.
California’s importance in U.S. manufacturing, agriculture and forestry means “no other state will be more impacted” by tariffs, Mr. Newsom said Wednesday after he and his state filed the suit, decrying what he called the “toxic uncertainty” of Mr. Trump’s actions.
The suit, submitted to U.S. District Court, warns that tariffs will yield “untold consequences” for farmers, port workers, small businesses and households.
“This is recklessness at another level,” Mr. Newsom said. “The geopolitical impacts are outsized. The trade impacts are outsized.”
The California suit will join three others already filed by groups that would otherwise have little in common, spanning different corners of the country and vastly different ideological orientations.
The other cases – filed on behalf of Blackfeet tribal members, small businesses in the U.S. northeast and southwest, and a Florida entrepreneur who imports day planners from China – argue that Mr. Trump’s fentanyl tariffs are illegal, saying the President has no authority to order such levies under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.
The legal questions are so urgent that they could make their way before the Supreme Court as quickly as this year, lawyers and constitutional scholars say.
If the cases succeed, they could strike away at least some of the border measures applied to Canadian goods in recent weeks. They also stand to constrain Mr. Trump’s use of import taxes as a tool for negotiation, reprisal and revenue.
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The President has used tariffs under IEEPA against Canada, China and Mexico, citing what he called a fentanyl emergency. He has also used IEEPA as a justification for the “Liberation Day” tariffs that imposed 10-per-cent levies on most imports to the U.S. In that case, the White House has cited an emergency related to “large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits.”
The cases also open the way to claims for financial recovery from those who have paid the tariffs.
It’s a matter of holding the White House to the law, said Timothy Meyer, a scholar of international business law at Duke University who clerked for Neil Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court justices nominated by Mr. Trump.
The U.S. Constitution “is clear that the power to tax – and tariffs are just taxes – is exclusively reserved for Congress,” he said. “There’s no question it would have struck the founders as extraordinary that a president could simply turn tariffs on and off willy nilly without any authorization from Congress. This is almost exactly the situation that led to the American revolution.”
Another suit, filed on behalf of a New York wine importer, a Salt Lake City pipe maker, a Vermont cycling apparel brand and several others, argues that the trade deficits invoked by Mr. Trump as one reason for tariffs are longstanding, and therefore cannot be called an emergency.
The Trump administration has argued that it possesses the necessary powers, saying Congress deliberately left it to the president to determine what constitutes an emergency. In a legal filing, it noted that in a list of explicit exceptions to those powers, none “involves the President’s authority to impose tariffs to deal with a declared national emergency.”
The White House has also sought to transfer two of the cases to the Court of International Trade, which the administration argues is where tariff-related cases must be argued.
But those filing suit say that is exactly the point of their challenge: that Mr. Trump should not have the ability to enact levies as he has.
“The President acted under emergency law, not under tariff law,” argues Andrew Morris, senior litigation counsel with New Civil Liberties Alliance, which has brought the case on behalf of a Florida entrepreneur. “So we’re not supposed to be in that court.”
In Montana, lawyers have made a similar argument. Congress has not delegated to Mr. Trump the necessary authority over commerce with tribal groups or foreign nations, said Monica Tranel, a lawyer representing four members of the Blackfeet Tribe.
When the Constitution was drafted, “George Washington was the president,” she said. “And if they had wanted George Washington to do commerce, they could have said that. And they would have said that. They didn’t.”
The Blackfeet members have argued that the full suite of tariffs under IEEPA should be called off. Failing that, they want two Montana ports of entry on tribal land – at Piegan-Carway and Del Bonita – to be exempt from the tariffs. If that does not succeed, they say tribal members should themselves be exempt.
The arguments are legal. But the intent goes beyond the mere facts of the case.
“For me, personally, I definitely want the Canadians to know and understand that we American citizens consider you our friends,” Ms. Tranel said.
She noted the unusual circumstances that have placed Blackfeet members in alignment with the libertarian New Civil Liberties Alliance, whose funders include conservative billionaire Charles Koch.
Still, “to my knowledge, I have never been on the same side of anything as Charles Koch. But we’re on the same side on this,” Ms. Tranel said.
(A representative for Mr. Koch said he is not involved in the tariff suit.)
Earlier this year, constitutional scholars expressed reservations about whether anyone could successfully take Mr. Trump to court over tariffs that were, at that time, still a concept.
But the cases filed to date “are a lot stronger and more persuasive than most people thought,” said Michael McConnell, a former Republican-nominated U.S. Court of Appeals circuit judge who is now director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. “These are very substantial challenges.”
It makes sense, he said, to question whether IEEPA was intended to allow a president to wield tariffs as a tool of foreign policy. Other actions taken under IEEPA, such as freezing assets of terrorist groups, affect the economic well-being of foreign groups.
“But tariffs are actually imposed on American citizens,” Prof. McConnell said. “There’s good reason to think that Congress was not willing to delegate such broad authority over domestic taxation to the president.”
The existence of multiple challenges could also involve the country’s top court at an earlier date.
“If you get different decisions coming out of these courts, the Supreme Court would almost have to hear the case to resolve it. It can’t be the case that the tariffs are legal in California but not in Florida,” said Prof. Meyer, the Duke scholar.
It’s not clear, however, how much Mr. Trump’s tariff agenda will be frustrated, even if the Supreme Court finds that his IEEPA tariffs are illegal. The White House has also imposed border measures using other authorities, including Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which was used to back the steel and aluminum levies.
If any IEEPA tariffs are struck down, the Trump administration could attempt to restructure them on other legal grounds. But doing so will require more extensive adherence to statutory requirements, including the completion of trade investigations to create a legal basis for levies.
Tariffs brought on those grounds “may still be arbitrary,” Prof. Meyer said. “But they will be much less arbitrary than the tariffs we’re seeing under IEEPA, because they can’t simply imposed on any product at any time on the president’s whim.”