On Thursday morning, attorneys representing the administration stood before a panel of federal judges in Washington, D.C., to defend the President Donald Trump's use of emergency economic powers to levy tariffs.
By Thursday evening, however, a new executive order seemed to undermine the legal basis for those tariffs. With the enforcement of some tariffs postponed until early October, it's becoming ever more difficult to believe that the president is responding to "an unusual and extraordinary threat."
That's the key phrase in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the 1977 statute that Trump has invoked to apply tariffs on imports from Canada, China, Mexico, and now dozens of other countries. It is also at the crux of the lawsuit currently sitting before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In oral arguments on Thursday, Trump's attorneys argued that America's trade deficit constituted exactly such a threat, and that the law ought to allow Trump to take action. (Never mind that—as an economic matter rather than a legal one—trade deficits aren't emergencies and tariffs are unlikely to reduce them.)
