Two small American businesses sued the Trump administration over its new round of sweeping tariffs, launching a fresh legal challenge against Donald Trump’s signature economic policy.
The lawsuit was filed by the Liberty Justice Center, which won a US supreme court case against the president’s tariffs earlier this year, forcing the administration to unravel many of its controversial import duties.
Trump has aggressively sought alternative pathways to make his trade policy permanent without congressional approval, despite the court’s 6-3 ruling that the president overstepped his executive powers by issuing his “liberation day” tariffs.
The latest tariffs, which were announced late on Thursday, will hit more than 80 countries with either a 10% or 12.5% levy. They were implemented under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows the president to bypass congressional approval in order to prevent goods made with “forced labor” from being imported.
Trump used this law in his first term to enact tariffs against China, which withstood several court challenges.
The plaintiffs of the latest lawsuit argued that Trump’s actions exceed the authority of Section 301, which should be “targeted, country-specific and practice-specific remedial authority”, unlike the vast duties Trump levied on Thursday night.
They also allege the US trade representative (USTR) “failed to provide a reasoned, record-based explanation for its determinations” and argued that more country-specific findings about forced labor are needed in order for the tariffs to be legally justified.
The USTR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two businesses pursuing the lawsuit are Burlap and Barrel, a spice importer based in New York, and Collective Horology, a watchmaker based in California. Both businesses source material from many of the countries hit by tariffs: Burlap and Barrel imports spices from Canada, India, Spain, Turkey and Vietnam, while Collective Horology distributes watches from countries made in the United Kingdom, France and Austria.
“These tariffs would punish a responsible American business, and the farmers we work with, without showing how taxes on our spices would address the policies of foreign governments that USTR says it is targeting,” the co-founder and co-CEO of Burlap and Barrel, Ethan Frisch, said in a statement.
The Liberty Justice Center is a libertarian public interest law firm that is part of the litigation arm of the Illinois Policy Institute, a free market thinktank. In the case against Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, the firm argued that Trump relied on emergency powers in order to push his tariffs through.
This time around the Liberty Justice Center has argued that Trump is unfairly using the issue of forced labor, echoing the claims that several lawmakers have made since the new tariffs were unveiled.
“Forced labor is morally indefensible, but an important objective does not give the government permission to ignore the law,” said Sara Albrecht, CEO of the Liberty Justice Center. “The administration allowed one global tariff to expire and immediately replaced it with another under a different statute.
“Changing the statute doesn’t change the law. Every tariff authority has limits, and every administration must respect them.”
