President Donald Trump’s top trade negotiator admitted that the 10 - or 15 - percent tariff announced by Trump after the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping “liberation day” levies can only be in place for 150 days without action from Congress despite Trump’s claim to the contrary.
U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer told Bloomberg News on Wednesday that Trump’s proclamation to levy a global 10 percent tax on all imports in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court ruling is only a “temporary, 150 day authority” meant to provide “continuity” with the now-invalidated taxes Trump had purported to impose by fiat under a 1977 law that did not mention tariffs at all.
Those tariffs, which Trump imposed under a little-known part of American trade law known as Section 122, only allow the tariffs in question to be in force past that 150-day deadline with the specific authorization of Congress.
But Trump has rejected the need for legislative action to extend the tariffs.
During his State of the Union speech, the president claimed that “Congressional action will not be necessary” because the authorities he’s now invoking, including Section 122, are “time-tested and approved.”
Greer also warned that the administration plans to “reconstruct” Trump’s illegal tax scheme with “alternative tools” in order to “maintain the policy” — even though that policy is broadly unpopular with a majority of Americans, according to public polling.
“We'll just have a change in the legal implementing authority,” he said.
The U.S. trade negotiator’s admission of some limits to Trump’s tariff authority comes less than a week after the nation’s conservative-majority high court determined that he could not impose tariffs by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, because the Carter-era law didn’t explicitly give him the authority to impose import taxes for any reason.
The ruling did not impact all of Trump’s tariffs, just those brought under the 1970s law. That included “reciprocal” tariffs on other countries since he announced that policy during an April event on what he’d dubbed “Liberation Day” as well as tariffs specifically imposed on Canada, China and Mexico to stop the flow of fentanyl.
Trump reacted by lashing out at the 6-3 Supreme Court for striking down much of his unilateral tariff policy, calling the ruling “deeply disappointing” and declaring that he was “absolutely ashamed” of the Republican appointees on the court who’d failed to back his signature policy.
“They're just being fools and lap dogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats ... they're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” Trump said, employing an acronym indicating that the three conservatives who’d ruled against him — Chief Justice John Roberts, and his two appointees, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett — were “Republicans In Name Only.”
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