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A New Jersey food importer filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging President Donald Trump's power to invoke a Depression-era law to levy a 50% tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods.
The Gellert Global Group, a third-generation family business that imports Canadian cheese, took its case to the U.S. Court of International Trade, a specialized court in New York.
In August, Trump reached back to Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to impose the tariffs on Canada, prompting dollar-for-dollar retaliation from Ottawa and straining already-tense relations between the neighbors and longtime allies. The president last month escalated the conflict by announcing an outright ban on nearly $1 billion worth of Canadian products, including alcoholic beverages, dairy products and motorcycles.
The president's Section 338 tariff authority had never been used in a trade dispute, let alone tested in court.
"No president should have the power to pull a dormant statute off the shelf and use it to impose sweeping tariffs or import bans without the limits Congress required," said Sara Albrecht, chair of the Liberty Justice Center, a libertarian advocacy group that is representing the Gellert firm and which successfully challenged previous Trump tariffs before the Supreme Court earlier this year.
The White House said the administration would vigorously defend Trump's tariffs on Canadian imports and considers Section 338 appropriate to counter what the administration considers Canadian discrimination against American dairy, alcohol and auto exports.