California is one of two dozen states suing over a new round of global tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump last month.
“At its core, this lawsuit is about protecting everyday Americans from the harmful effects of unlawful tariffs,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta during a Zoom news conference Thursday morning. He was joined by the Attorneys General from Arizona, Oregon and New York.
“Trump is trying to use an obscure law to push through tariffs that his coequal branch of Congress, not the President alone, is supposed to authorize,” Bonta said.
After the Supreme Court struck down the initial round of Trump tariffs, the President moved quickly to use part of the Trade Act of 1974 to institute new tariffs; first 10%, then the next day up to 15% on nearly every country in the world.
Bonta was direct. “Simply put, the law does not allow this and we won’t stand by while it’s broken,” he said.
The lawsuit said the tariffs will increase costs for states, consumers and businesses.
“I think for the last year, we've been on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, so it's hard to make business decisions when there's so much uncertainty,” said Kathy Olsen, chief financial officer of RCP Block & Brick, which supplies hardscape products to customers across San Diego county.
The company manufactures some of the product they sell in their Otay Mesa facility. But whether they make it or import it, Olsen said the tariffs are a problem.
“It's not just like, 'OK, this load of stone came in and it was higher priced. So we have to raise our price.' We have to go through our whole catalog and reassign pricing to all our manufactured products. So it's not quite as simple as it is with our resale material that we purchase,” Olsen said.
The latest round of tariffs have an expiration date. They can only stay in effect for 150-days before Congress must vote whether to extend them.
It remains to be seen whether that date in late July will come first, or whether the Court of International Trade will weigh in before then; that’s the very court that first struck down the last round of tariffs before they made their way to the Supreme Court.
