Five businesses have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that President Trump lacks the authority to issue sweeping tariffs without congressional approval.
The lawsuit, filed by the Liberty Justice Center on behalf of VOS Selections, FishUSA, Inc., Genova Pipe, MicroKits LLC, and Terry Precision Cycling, alleges that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act “does not authorize the President to unilaterally issue across-the-board worldwide tariffs.”
“His claimed emergency is a figment of his own imagination: trade deficits, which have persisted for decades without causing economic harm, are not an emergency,” the lawsuit claims. “Nor do these trade deficits constitute an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat.'”
The filing asks the court to “declare the President’s unprecedented power grab illegal, enjoin the operation of the executive actions that purport to impose these tariffs under the IEEPA, and reaffirm this country’s core founding principle: there shall be no taxation without representation.”
Discussing Trump’s “Liberation Day” order, the lawsuit claims the move “levied much higher tariff rates on dozens of countries based on what the administration claimed to be an estimate of ‘tariff and nontariff barriers,’ but ultimately turned out to be a simple ratio of the trade deficit in goods (excluding services) as a percentage of total U.S. imports from the given country.”
“The chosen formula is not an accepted methodology for calculating trade barriers and has no basis in economic theory,” the filing states, adding that the Liberation Day tariffs, despite citing several statutes, does not grant Trump the authority to impose tariffs.
“The ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ asserted as a ‘national emergency’ by the Liberation Day Order is not an emergency, and is not unusual, extraordinary, new, unexpected, odd, or even surprising,” the filing argues.
Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center Jeffrey Schwab said in a statement on the lawsuit, “No one person should have the power to impose taxes that have such vast global economic consequences. The Constitution gives the power to set tax rates—including tariffs—to Congress, not the President.”
