“To place huge new tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump claimed that those transactions are “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States.
It’s a threat that the White House now says it can put off addressing for another 90 days.
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This is not just a rhetorical point but a question that’s central to the legality of the tariffs. In front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last month, the Trump administration’s lawyer told skeptical judges that the president’s tariff powers rested upon the existence of an “unusual threat” that the president was taking action to “deal with.”
The latest delay in the China tariffs, then, seems to directly undermine that claim. If Trump wants to use the threat of tariffs to negotiate a new trade deal with China, fine, but then that’s not an emergency—and, as a result, those tariffs cannot be implemented with the emergency powers the president is currently claiming.”