International Trade Today is providing readers with some of the top stories for March 2-6 in case they were missed.
A coalition of U.S. manufacturers seeks the imposition of new antidumping duties on common alloy aluminum sheet from Bahrain, Brazil, Croatia, Egypt, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, South Korea, Oman, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan and Turkey, and new countervailing duties on common alloy aluminum sheet from Bahrain, Brazil, India and Turkey, it said in a petition filed with the Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission March 7. Commerce will now decide whether to begin AD/CVD investigations, which could result in the imposition of permanent AD/CV duty orders and the assessment of AD and CV duties on importers.
The Section 232 tariffs taxing steel have not been enough to protect AK Steel, according to Rep. Troy Balderson, R-Ohio, and Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who say that restrictive action must be taken against downstream products made of grain-oriented electrical steel imported from Canada and Mexico. They wrote to President Donald Trump on March 6, saying that Canada and Mexico do “very limited processing” on electrical steel that they import, which then enters the U.S. as stacked and stacked cores or laminations. “We implore the U.S. Trade Representative and Department of Commerce to address this matter immediately before our communities lose thousands of jobs and our country sees the door of the last American maker of electrical steel shuttered.” Balderson's district includes an AK Steel facility in Zanesville, Ohio, with 100 jobs, and Kelly's district has an AK Steel mill in Butler, Pennsylvania, with 1,500 jobs.
The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and five other Republican senators signed on to a friend of the court brief pushing for the publication of the Commerce Department report on how imported autos and auto parts imperil national security. The brief, filed March 6, reminds the judge that Congress required the Commerce Department to release the report by Jan. 19 and that the original law that contains Section 232 requires publication of the report. The case the senators are joining is a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Cause of Action Institute filed last month.
CBP has assessed about $59 billion in duties under the major trade remedies started during the Trump administration as of March 4, according to CBP's trade statistics page. That includes $47.8 billion in duties from the Section 301 tariffs on goods from China, and $335 million in Section 301 tariffs on goods from the European Union. CBP also has assessed about $6.8 billion under the Section 232 tariffs on steel and $2 billion under tariffs on aluminum. The Section 201 trade remedies on washing machines, washing machine parts and solar cells account for $1.6 billion in assessed tariffs. CBP's statistics account for refunds provided to importers.
Clarification: Jeffrey Neely of Husch Blackwell is the lead attorney for J. Conrad and Metropolitan Staple in their respective lawsuits challenging Section 232 tariffs on “derivatives” (see 2003030048).
Commerce Department Deputy Chief of Staff and Policy Director Earl Comstock is leaving the department, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said March 2 in a news release. Comstock was reportedly heavily involved in the export restrictions on Huawei Technologies and the Section 232 investigations.
Rep. Jackie Walorski, an Indiana Republican who has homed in on Commerce Department oversight on Section 232 exclusions, wrote to the agency March 3 questioning the legality of expanding the enforcement action to steel and aluminum derivative articles. “A sudden announcement on a Friday evening is not befitting such a dramatic paradigm shift from tariffs only on raw materials to now include downstream products as well,” she wrote.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told reporters March 3 that he still wants to advance legislation that would reform Section 232 -- and he suggested that a greater congressional role might be warranted for Section 301, as well. “I want to move 232 and a number of members of my Finance Committee have talked to me about doing it,” he said, immediately adding that the bill is not an attack on President Donald Trump. He said that while the president's use of tariffs has shown Congress the shortcomings of the laws that allowed national security tariffs on steel and massive tariffs on China, his interest is in reasserting some congressional prerogatives on trade.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Feb. 24 - March 1: