President Donald Trump delivers remarks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Friday, March 7, 2025 (Pool via AP).
The Trump administration is emphasizing its stance that the president has the authority to single-handedly enforce tariffs worldwide, stating that this power is not subject to review by federal judges.
In a document spanning 45 pages, the administration contended on Tuesday that the U.S. Court of International Trade should dismiss a plea to temporarily stop the tariffs and support the government’s request for a summary judgment in a lawsuit challenging the legality of the president’s actions. The Department of Justice argued that Trump’s choice to use an emergency law and apply the tariffs “cannot be reviewed” by the courts.
The lawsuit originated from a complaint lodged on April 14 by a group of businesses who described the tariffs as an unprecedented seizure of power and criticized the president’s concerns about trade imbalances between countries as a product of his own imagination.
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The plaintiffs alleged that 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 apparent due process, despite the fact that the U.S. is not at war.
Trump on April 2 invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), declaring a national emergency and claiming that “persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits” have threatened military readiness and compromised national security. The act 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.
“Plaintiffs argue that IEEPA, even if it authorizes tariffs in some circumstances, does not authorize the challenged tariffs because plaintiffs disagree with the President’s declared emergency,” attorneys with the Justice Department wrote. “But whether a threat is unusual or extraordinary is reviewable only by Congress, not by the courts.”
According to the administration, Congress “designated itself” as having supervisory control over a president’s emergency declarations, meaning the question of whether persistent trade deficits pose a threat to the United States, as Trump asserts, is “beyond the courts’ authority to resolve.”
“The question is not fit for judicial resolution. It is for the political branches to resolve. Indeed, the tariffs at issue are presently being debated in Congress, as designed under IEEPA’s legislative-review component,” the filing states. “Moreover, the equities and public interest cut against enjoining a President from using his foreign-affairs powers to protect the United States’ economy and national security.”
The same judicial panel on April 22 tersely rejected the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order on the levies, reasoning the coalition of businesses had not “clearly shown a likelihood that immediate and irreparable harm would occur before consideration of their Motion for Preliminary Injunction.”
A coalition of Democratic states has also challenged Trump tariffs, claiming they have created a U.S. national trade policy that “hinges on the President’s whims rather than the sound exercise of his lawful authority.”
The tariffs, which the president expanded several times throughout April, affect nearly every country in the world as Trump seeks to make good on his campaign promise to end bilateral trade deficits with U.S. trading partners. The measures have baffled economists, with many criticizing the president’s position on macroeconomic trade imbalances.
“It’s totally silly,” Dani Rodrik, an economist who studies globalization at Harvard University, told the New York Times earlier this month. “There’s no other way to say it, it makes no sense.”
