President Donald Trump listens during a ceremonial swearing in of Paul Atkins as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, April 22, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
A coalition of Democratic states are suing President Donald Trump over his controversial tariffs, arguing that he has “no authority to arbitrarily impose” such levies on Americans “as he has done here.”
The 38-page complaint, filed in the U. S. Court of International Trade, asserts that the president’s tariffs have created a U.S. national trade policy that “now hinges on the President’s whims rather than the sound exercise of his lawful authority.”
According to the plaintiff states, which include New York, Oregon, Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois, Trump unlawfully imposed the tariffs under an emergency statute in the absence of any actual emergency — an argument reminiscent of challenges to Trump’s invocation of an 18th-century wartime power to conduct mass deportations with little or no due process, despite the fact that the U.S. is not at war.
“The text and history of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) — the statute the President has invoked for the most damaging of his tariffs — confirm that the President cannot impose such tariffs under that law,” the complaint states. “By claiming the authority to impose immense and ever-changing tariffs on whatever goods entering the United States he chooses, for whatever reason he finds convenient to declare an emergency, the President has upended the constitutional order and brought chaos to the American economy.”
As previously reported by Law&Crime, the IEEPA grants the executive sweeping authority to quickly combat international economic crises and permits the executive to order sanctions as a rapid response to international emergencies. The question is whether Trump’s current unilateral imposition of the levies constitutes an unlawful usurpation of the legislative branch’s control of the country’s purse strings.
The states are seeking a court order declaring Trump’s tariffs “unlawful” and therefore not in effect as well as an injunction preventing government agencies from enforcing the tariffs. It also challenges Trump’s plan for another round of tariffs to take effect on July 9, 2025.
