The Trump administration on Thursday asked a federal appeals court to immediately block a lower court ruling that barred the United States from implementing tariffs involving dozens of countries.
Hours later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit put a temporary administrative halt to the lower court order, at least while the appellate court more fully considers the administration’s emergency request to block the lower court order as it pursues an appeal.
The appeals court asked the sides to file briefs on that request, a process that would end June 9.
The government had said in the filing that it planned to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court on Friday if it didn’t get “at least” interim relief from the Federal Circuit.
The administration’s emergency motion slammed the lower court’s ruling as “unprecedented and legally indefensible,” saying it upended the Trump administration’s efforts to “reorient the global economy on an equal footing.”
“The injunction unilaterally disarms the United States in the face of the longstanding predatory trade practices of other countries — who, notwithstanding the injunction, remain free to impose punitive tariffs on American products,” the administration argued in the filing.
On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade found that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 does not allow for “unbounded authority,” finding that the statute could not be used to impose “unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.”
Trump’s tariff decisions exceeded the authority given to him by Congress, the lower court found.
The government in the emergency motion argued that the ruling threatens to “unwind” months of sensitive diplomatic negotiations and foreign policy decision-making at the expense of national security.
It’s the political branches, not the courts, that set economic policy and foreign policy, according to the motion, but the trade court decision “disables the President from using a critical tool that Congress authorized him to wield, in the middle of time-sensitive negotiations with multiple foreign countries over future trade agreements.”
The trade court decision found that “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power to another branch of government.”
The ruling said the imposition of the worldwide and retaliatory tariffs address an imbalance in trade, which it called a “type of balance-of-payments deficit,” so it falls under narrower, non-emergency authorities.
The cases are State of Oregon, et al., v. the Department of Homeland Security, et al., and V.O.S. Selections, et al., v. United States, et al.
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