massive tax cuts<\/a> he signed into law on July 4.<\/p>\nLoading<\/p>\n
The government has argued that if the tariffs are struck down, it might have to refund some of the import taxes it has collected, delivering a financial blow to the Treasury.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION!\u201d Trump said in a previous social media post.<\/p>\n
Revenue from tariffs totalled $US159 billion ($243 billion) by July, more than double what it was at the same point the year before. Indeed, the Justice Department warned in a legal filing this month that revoking the tariffs could mean \u201cfinancial ruin\u201d for the United States.<\/p>\n
The ruling involves two sets of import taxes, both of which Trump justified by declaring a national emergency under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.<\/p>\n
That includes sweeping tariffs he announced April 2 \u2013 \u201cLiberation Day\u201d, he called it \u2013 when he imposed tariffs of up to 50 per cent \u2013 he falsely claimed they were \u201creciprocal\u201d \u2013 on countries with which the US runs trade deficits and a \u201cbaseline\u201d 10 per cent tariff on just about everyone else. Australia received the lowest rate, 10 per cent.<\/p>\n
The national emergency underlying the tariffs, Trump said, was the long-running gap between what the US sells and what it buys from the rest of the world. The president started to levy modified tariff rates in August, but goods from countries with which the US runs a surplus also face the taxes.<\/p>\n
It also covers the \u201ctrafficking tariffs\u201d he announced February 1 on imports from Canada, China and Mexico. These were designed to get those countries to do more to stop what he declared a national emergency: the illegal flow of drugs and immigrants across their borders into the US.<\/p>\n
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The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose taxes, including tariffs. But over decades, lawmakers have ceded authorities to the president, and Trump has made the most of the power vacuum.<\/p>\n
But Trump\u2019s assertion that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act essentially gives him unlimited power to tax imports quickly drew legal challenges \u2013 at least seven cases. No president had ever used the law to justify tariffs, though the act had been used frequently to impose export restrictions and other sanctions on US adversaries such as Iran and North Korea.<\/p>\n
In May, the US Court of International Trade in New York rejected the argument, ruling that Trump\u2019s global tariffs \u201cexceed any authority granted to the president\u201d under the emergency powers law. In reaching its decision, the trade court combined two challenges \u2013 one by five businesses and one by 12 US states \u2013 into a single case.<\/p>\n
In the case of the drug trafficking and immigration tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico, the trade court ruled that the levies did not meet the International Emergency Economic Powers Act\u2019s requirement that they \u201cdeal with\u201d the problem they were supposed to address.<\/p>\n
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The court challenge does not cover other Trump tariffs, including levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos that the president imposed after Commerce Department investigations concluded that those imports were threats to US national security.<\/p>\n
Nor does it include tariffs that Trump imposed on China in his first term \u2013 and Joe Biden kept during his presidency \u2013 after a government investigation concluded that the country used unfair practices to give their own technology firms an edge over rivals from the US and other Western nations.<\/p>\n
Trump has alternative laws for imposing import taxes, but they would limit the speed and severity with which he could act.<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what\u2019s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The government would \u201ccontinue to engage and strongly advocate for removal of the tariffs\u201d, they said. White House…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-107269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}