Law firms sue Trump admin over executive orders
President Donald Trump during an Iftar dinner.

President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during an Iftar dinner in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, Thursday, March 27, 2025 (Pool via AP).

A conservative legal group is taking legal action against the Trump administration concerning the tariffs on Chinese imports. They claim that the tariffs were implemented using emergency executive power in a manner that is deemed “unlawful”.

In a 29-page complaint filed at the Northern District of Florida on Thursday by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), it is contended that the authority to impose tariffs solely rests with Congress and not the president.

“By invoking emergency power to impose an across-the-board tariff on imports from China that the statute does not authorize, President Trump has misused that power, usurped Congress’s right to control tariffs, and upset the Constitution’s separation of powers,” NCLA senior litigation counsel Andrew Morris said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit.

According to the nonprofit group, the statutes under which Trump purported to issue the levies — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) — grants the executive sweeping authority to quickly combat international economic crises, permitting the president to “order sanctions as a rapid response to international emergencies.” However, the NCLA asserts that the emergency statute does not allow the president to usurp the legislative branch’s control of the country’s purse strings through the unilateral imposition of tariffs.

“Congress passed the IEEPA to counter external emergencies, not to grant presidents a blank check to write domestic economic policy,” the complaint states.

The right-leaning legal group is seeking a court order declaring that Trump’s tariffs are an “unconstitutional exercise of legislative power” and enjoining them from being implemented and enforced.

The complaint alleges that Trump is the first president to use the emergency statute as a means of imposing tariffs, saying that fact is “not surprising” because “the statute does not even mention tariffs, nor does it say anything else suggesting it authorizes presidents to tax American citizens.”

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