Court doubts Trump tariffs
A federal trade court sharply questioned the legal basis for President Trump’s 10% global tariff, signaling judges may not accept the administration’s replacement rationale. The hearing zeroed in on whether Section 122 of the Trade Act can lawfully justify broad import duties — a point parts of the federal government and the DOJ have previously treated as dubious — and judges pressed the administration on statutory fit rather than policy merits. That legal uncertainty arrives as inflation jumped 0.9% in March, driven largely by higher petrol prices, which complicates the politics and economic consequences of any sustained import levies. (reuters.com) (politico.com) (pbs.org) (nbcnews.com)
Three judges spent nearly three hours pressing the Trump administration on a basic question: what law, exactly, lets a president put a 10 percent tariff on nearly every country in the world after the Supreme Court already threw out his last tariff plan. The case is in the United States Court of International Trade, and the judges were not arguing about whether tariffs are good policy. They were asking whether Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 actually fits what Trump is trying to do in 2026. Trump turned to Section 122 on February 20, 2026, just hours after the Supreme Court said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not give him power to impose broad tariffs. His replacement order set a 10 percent global tariff that can last only 150 days unless Congress extends it. Section 122 is not a general “president can tax imports” button. It was written for a “large and serious balance-of-payments deficit,” which is a specific problem closer to a country running short on foreign currency than to a country simply buying more goods than it sells. That is why the hearing sounded so technical. Judge Timothy Stanceu said, “We’re not quite sure how to translate 1974 into 2026,” which is judge-speak for: this law may belong to a different economic era. Lawyers challenging the tariff say the administration is treating an old, narrow emergency tool like a universal backup generator for trade policy. They argue the statute was built around the dollar, currency flows, and a financial system that looked very different before decades of modern globalization. Even before Friday’s hearing, this legal theory looked shaky in one important way: the Supreme Court never approved it. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the earlier tariff case that the court would not “speculate on hypothetical cases,” so Trump’s claim that the justices blessed Section 122 was false. The practical problem is timing. The tariff is set to expire in July 2026 unless Congress acts, and the White House has already signaled it wants to use Section 122 as a bridge while it looks for other legal authorities that could support longer-lasting duties. All of this is landing on the same day the March inflation report showed consumer prices up 0.9 percent in one month and 3.3 percent from a year earlier. Gasoline alone jumped 21.2 percent in March, which NBC called the biggest one-month increase at the pump since 1967. That does not prove the tariff caused March inflation, because the March spike was driven mainly by energy after the Iran war. But it does mean any court fight over import taxes is now happening while households are already paying about $4.15 a gallon for gas and seeing real wages fall 0.6 percent for the month. So the fight is no longer just Trump versus his trading partners. It is Trump versus the wording of a 52-year-old statute, a skeptical trade court, a July deadline, and an inflation backdrop that leaves much less room for error than there was a month ago.
