Just one day after the U.S. Court of International Trade blocked President Donald Trump’s “unlawful” tariffs, a federal judge separately concluded that the White House cannot cite “emergency powers” to impose this kind of “tax” on the American public.
“Since the founding, the Constitution has vested the ‘power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises’ with Congress. The president has no independent discretion to impose or alter tariffs,” U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras wrote in his 33-page opinion on Thursday.
Contreras’ decision to block the tariffs is limited to two family-owned toy companies in Illinois, Learning Resources and hand2mind, which design educational games that develop children’s physical and mental skills — and import their products from abroad. However, the order paves the way for similar and broader nationwide injunctions, because it declares that five of Trump’s executive orders are plainly “unlawful.”