Two days after President Trump's forced-labor tariffs took effect on 60 trading partners, small-business plaintiffs and foreign governments have opened a coordinated challenge to duties lawyers say will be difficult to unwind.
Two lawsuits filed Friday in the U.S. Court of International Trade argue the administration is using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a pretext to recreate the global tariff regime the Supreme Court struck down in February. Brazil and Australia, both facing 12.5 percent duties, have called the U.S. justification arbitrary. Economists and former trade officials say the new levies are likely to stay in place for years, even if courts eventually narrow them.
The legal challenge
Educational-toy maker Learning Resources, part of the coalition that won February's Supreme Court ruling against Trump's emergency tariffs, filed one suit with several other small businesses. New York spice company Burlap and Barrel and California watch retailer Collective Horology filed the second, represented by the Liberty Justice Center, the libertarian group that argued the earlier case.
"Forced labor is morally indefensible, but an important objective does not give the government permission to ignore the law," Sara Albrecht, Liberty Justice Center chairman and CEO, said. "The administration allowed one global tariff to expire and immediately replaced it with another under a different statute. Changing the statute doesn't change the law."
The complaint contends Section 301 is being used in a manner "designed to preserve substantially the same broad tariff regime that this Court and the Supreme Court have held Congress did not authorize." Peter Harrell, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, told CNBC the statute was "never intended for the president to just wholesale rewrite the tariff schedule."
Foreign pushback
Brazil called the U.S. move "arbitrary and unjustified" and accused Washington of manipulating a human-rights issue to justify duties on 59 countries and the European Union. Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell, speaking to reporters in Adelaide, said that "amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that."
Long haul
Patrick Childress, a partner at Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official, told AP News that "these tariffs will be with us for the long haul," warning that even countries that adopt the enforcement regime Washington wants will need to prove compliance to Washington's satisfaction before duties come off. Andrew Siciliano, global head of trade and customs at KPMG, said companies should "plan around the tariffs that exist today rather than assume they will be quickly reversed or modified."
Counterpoint
Today's on-the-record reporting drew only from wire and center-lean outlets; no fresh Republican-outlet critique of the tariffs or the lawsuits appeared in the day's cycle. Republican defense of the duties came primarily from administration officials cited by AP News and CNBC. A senior administration official told reporters the forced-labor focus is "something that President Trump has been focused on ... for many years." Greta Peisch, a former USTR general counsel now at Wiley Rein, told CNBC that Section 301 "gives a lot of flexibility" and creates "a pretty difficult standard to have to argue against."
What comes next
The Court of International Trade has not set a hearing date on either complaint. Trump on Friday said the U.S. would "immediately" open a new Section 301 investigation of the European Union over its digital-services fines, a fresh test of the same statute now on trial.