Setback as US court blocks Trump’s tariffs implementation

By Nkiruka Nnorom with agency report

A United States federal court has blocked most of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, with a ruling that could derail his trade strategy, boosting markets Thursday.

The judgment marks a significant setback to Trump as he bids to redraw the US trading relationship with the world by forcing governments to the negotiating table through tough new tariffs.

Trump’s global trade war has roiled financial markets with a stop-start rollout of import levies aimed at punishing economies that have significant trade deficit against the United States.

Trump argued that the trade deficits and the threat posed by the influx of drugs constituted a “national emergency” that justified widespread tariffs.

But the three-judge Court of International Trade ruled Wednesday that Trump had overstepped his authority, and barred most of the duties announced since he took office in January.

The federal trade court ruled in two separate cases brought by businesses and a coalition of state governments, arguing that the president had violated congress’s power of the purse.

The judges said the cases rested on whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) delegate such powers to the president “in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.”

The court did not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder.

The judges stated that any interpretation of the IEEPA that “delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.”

Attorneys for the Trump administration promptly filed an appeal against the ruling, which gave the White House 10 days to complete the bureaucratic process of halting the tariffs.

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