Conservative Group Brings Suit Against IEEPA Reciprocal Tariffs to Trade Court
The conservative Liberty Justice Center brought a lawsuit on behalf of five importers to challenge the constitutionality of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as a source of tariff-setting authority. The complaint, filed April 14 at the Court of International Trade, makes two claims: President Donald Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs exceed the president's statutory authority under IEEPA and, even if this statutory authority exists, it's an "unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority" (V.O.S. Selections v. Donald J. Trump, CIT # 25-00066).
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The lawsuit is the third of its kind to challenge the use of IEEPA to impose tariffs (see 2504040036 and 2504100039), though it's the first to be filed in the trade court. The five companies leading the challenge are V.O.S. Selections; Plastic Services and Products, doing business as Genova Pipe; MicroKits; FishUSA; and Terry Precision Cycling.
They are represented by conservative litigation firm Liberty Justice Center, which issued a call for plaintiffs earlier this month to challenge the tariffs (see 2504070007). While not listed as one of the litigants at CIT, Ilya Somin, law professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, said he is helping litigate the case.
The complaint's first line of attack against the reciprocal tariffs is that they go beyond the statutory authority found in IEEPA. The brief said presidential authority to unilaterally set worldwide tariffs, "if Congress were to grant it at all, must be granted clearly and unmistakably -- not through some implication so vague and indeterminate that it went unnoticed by every other President for nearly five decades.”
IEEPA doesn't mention tariffs and has never been used to set tariffs, the complaint said. The brief indicates that the companies will challenge the president's declaration that trade deficits amount to a "national emergency," which currently stands as the basis for the tariffs. The importers said the "existence of trade deficits in goods with some other countries does not qualify as a national emergency" and is not an "unusual and extraordinary threat, as required by IEEPA."
The brief said courts are "generally skeptical of newly claimed grants of authority discovered for the first time in decades-old statutes." This claim was echoed in the lawsuit filed in Florida challenging the tariffs by the libertarian New Civil Liberties Alliance.
The complaint added that "Congress knows how to grant the President authority to impose or adjust tariffs when it wishes to," claiming that Trump decided to skirt these limits by "finding a new never-before-seen authority under IEEPA."
In addition to challenging the national emergency declaration, the Liberty Justice Center is challenging Trump's use of IEEPA as a violation of the "major questions" doctrine -- a legal theory adopted by the Supreme Court that says Congress must explicitly delegate the executive authority to regulate issues of major political or economic significance. "In the absence of a clear mandate in the Act, it is unreasonable to assume that Congress intended to give the [President] the unprecedented power over American industry that would result from the Government's view," the brief said, citing a 1980 court case Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute.
The complaint said the tariffs estimated to cost taxpayers some $1.4 billion to $2.2 billion over the next decade -- an impact "at least as large -- and likely much larger -- than executive actions previously found by the Supreme Court to be 'major questions,' requiring a clear statement by Congress to authorize executive discretion," the brief said.
Even if IEEPA grants this "broad, unlimited" authority to impose tariffs, "it is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority," the complaint added. The nondelegation doctrine requires Congress to provide the executive with an "intelligible principle" that will form the "basis of agency action" when it delegates its power, the brief said. The delegation of authority found in IEEPA is so broad as to shatter this principle, the complaint said.
The government's read of IEEPA would give the president "power to impose enormous costs that might produce little, if any, discernible benefit." This interpretation would "render the Act the equivalent of the delegations the Supreme Court previously struck down," the brief said. Should "longstanding, perfectly normal, bilateral trade deficits qualify as an 'emergency' and as an 'unusual and extraordinary threat,' the same can be said of virtually any international economic transaction that the President disapproves of for virtually any reason," the complaint said.
IEEPA has "no intelligible principle for the imposition of tariffs," the companies argued.
The importers alleged in the complaint that the tariffs will irreparably harm them. The tariffs will force the companies to "face increase costs for the goods they sell, less demand for their higher prices products, and disrupted supply chains, among other threats to their livelihood, up to and including potentially bankrupting otherwise-solvent companies," the brief said (using the ungrammatical references cited here).