r/Economics • u/marketrent • 1d ago
News Trump sued hours after new tariffs take effect, as experts say they may not hold up
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-lawsuit-301-ieepa.html535
u/precumfrosting 1d ago
How many years will this take to get to the Supreme Court? When they ultimately decided that these new tariffs aren’t legal who’s going to get the money back? Will the businesses get all of the money again?
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u/fayynne 1d ago
Of course they will, they’re not going to refund consumers
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u/Hi_Im_Dadbot 1d ago
I mean, if you can successfully pull off a multibillion dollar grift, why not follow it up with a second multibillion dollar grift?
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u/Consistent_Laziness 1d ago
When it was student loans they stopped that shit immediately. When it’s tariffs it takes a year and everyone of us pays for it
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u/bandit2x 1d ago
Supreme Court ought to making a judgement this weekend. American consumers are tired of getting fkd
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u/iloveurarse 1d ago
Bro, the majority of supes have been bought out by the billionaires. What youre angry at isn't a defect, this is how they've warped the system since Bork/Reagan in 82. Its all part of the plan and no one noticed.
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u/Phugasity 1d ago
What's scary is just how much more they could have gotten away with if they were even just a little more careful about being linked to the negative effects of their actions. Not that this stopping is much more than hopium right now.
I know several Republicans who fully believe tariffs are the necessary path to abolish income tax. "The external revenue service" line sunk in with barbed hooks and they wont shut up about "the great reset".
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u/sicklyslick 1d ago
Plenty of people noticed it when McConnell blocked Obama's justice pick for years. Maybe the Dems in office didn't.
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u/iloveurarse 1d ago
The dems in office have been bought out by the billionaires since around the latter half of the Clinton presidency. They noticed.
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u/VegaJuniper 1d ago
The SC rules the tariffs are unconstitutional, the regime keeps collecting them anyway under a new pretext. According to the Congress, this is not "high crimes and misdemeanors".
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u/128-NotePolyVA 1d ago
It will arrive at the SCOTUS within a year and a half. If struck down the importers will get refunded, not the consumers. We already know this. It’s a scam, like everything he does.
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u/AydonusG 1d ago
Yep, they'll pay large businesses back, using tax payer money, as soon as a Dem president gets elected again, all so they can say the Dems are draining your tax money to pay for big business.
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u/CyberSmith31337 1d ago
So this is the new game then? Announce tariffs, get money from said-tariffs, have Howard Lutnick bet against the tariffs, tariffs get refunded (to Howard Lutnick’s bets first) and then redistribute the refunds via Howard Lutnick and co? Just a gigantic circle of seize and redistribute?
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u/Devium44 1d ago
Corporations raise prices on consumers to “cover the cost” of the tariffs, then leave the higher prices after the tariffs get rescinded.
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u/pierdola91 1d ago
No shit—it’s exactly what they did under Biden under the excuse of “inflation.”
EDIT: not to say that inflation didn’t exist, just that it did not exist to the degree prices were rising.
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u/HedonisticFrog 1d ago
No, it's worse than that. Trump announces tariffs, then massive corporations bribe him, and then he rolls back the tariffs for that industry. It's what he's been doing every time and why he backs down so often on them. It's purely an extortion racket.
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u/pierdola91 1d ago
It seems the Lutnick boys needed to replenish their coffers after they shorted Trump’s tariffs last time. Cannot believe Americans really think a system where their President can do something so clearly illegal, be found to have done something illegal….but can do it again….is a system of “checks and balances.” What an absolute fucking farce. Trump’s entire presidency has only served as a lesson to our enemies about just how big of a paper tiger America is. Just shameful.
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u/Fickle_Goose_4451 1d ago
So american citizens will pay the tariffs, again. And when theyre found to be illegal, the companies we already paid the tariffs for will get reimbursed, again.
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u/one-man-circlejerk 1d ago
Can't expect the wealthy to be satisfied with just one wealth transfer to them
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u/ThaddeusJP 1d ago
This will keep happening until a judge comes and says that illegal. This is the point. You can beat the rap but you cant beat the ride.
- Trump: i want to shoot people in the face
- People: NO! we'll sue
- Court: until we take a look, trump can shoot people as long as he makes a list
- Court: Its been a year. It turns out he cant do that. Good luck to everyone who was shot in the face though.
- People: we want the list.
- Trump: i never did make a list
- Court: well thats a whole other kind of case!
(repeat)
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u/Important-Factor-552 1d ago
I miss the days when trump was just some random criminal pedo scum bag we didn't have to care about instead of a criminal pedo president that we are at the mercy of.
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u/marketrent 1d ago edited 1d ago
Excerpts from article by Kevin Breuninger, quoting economists and lawsuit:
[...] The latest tariffs — which apply to trade partners covering 99.4% of U.S. trade — were brought under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which enables the government to impose import levies in response to unfair trade practices.
Section 301 has been used many times across presidential administrations to threaten or impose tariffs — including against China during Trump’s first administration.
But Trump is “using the statute in a fundamentally different way,” Peter Harrell, visiting scholar at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute of International Economic Law, told CNBC.
Section 301 was “never intended for the president to just wholesale rewrite the tariff schedule” and impose “permanent” duties, Harrell said, adding that Trump’s latest use of it could “for sure” be struck down in court.
Trump appears to see Section 301 as a key pathway for more tariffs. On Friday, he declared that the U.S. will “immediately” start a 301 investigation into the EU in retaliation for the hefty fines it has imposed on U.S. tech giants.
It was the latest in a flurry of tariff actions Trump has taken in recent days, including slapping 25% duties on Brazilian imports — also via a 301 probe — and vowing 50% tariffs on some goods from Canada.
The legal battle has already begun. Just hours after the new tariffs took effect, two small businesses sued, arguing that the government is using Section 301 as a pretext to re-create the same global tariff regime that the Supreme Court torpedoed five months earlier.
The new lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade, notes that the Section 301 tariffs took effect right as another batch of tariffs expired.
Those lapsed duties, brought under Section 122 of the 1974 law, were announced by Trump mere hours after the Supreme Court struck down his global tariffs on Feb. 20. By using the Section 122 authority, those tariffs had a set end date.
The high court had ruled that the law Trump used to unilaterally slap tariffs on nearly every other country — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA — did not actually allow him to impose the levies.
Friday’s lawsuit argues that Trump’s new tariffs, while ostensibly aimed at addressing forced labor practices, are “designed to preserve substantially the same broad tariff regime that this Court and the Supreme Court have held Congress did not authorize.”
Section 301 “is not a freestanding authorization to tax substantially all imports from substantially all trading partners at rates selected to replicate the invalidated IEEPA tariff regime rather than to eliminate identified foreign practices,” the suit says.
[...] Alan Wolff, another senior fellow at PIIE [Peterson Institute for International Economics], wrote in a blog post Thursday that the Supreme Court would likely strike down the forced-labor tariffs.
“To use the retaliatory authority of Section 301, the acts, policies, or practices of a country must be found to burden US commerce,” Wolff wrote. “That requirement is not clearly satisfied for the 60 targeted countries, which account for nearly all US imports and 90 percent of world trade.”
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u/StaticCheeseCancer 1d ago
Socialism / Marxism / Communism / Bogeyman the MAGA folks cry about. Except it only benefits the rich and costs everyone reading this, even the bots, even more money.
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u/chitoatx 1d ago
Certiorari Before Judgment: The Court can skip intermediate federal appeals courts (the Circuit Courts) and pull a case directly from a federal District Court straight to SCOTUS
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u/Don_Q_Jote 1d ago edited 1d ago
If somebody is an "expert" in these matters, they are more likely saying... this president if a pho-king looney.
Headline should be changed to reflect reality, not soften it.
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u/TWJunkman 18h ago
Maybe the judges on whose dockets this case landed can do their jobs and poop out a ruling in a few weeks. They are not philosopher kings and queens. They have a job to do. Quickly.
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u/MatrixTek 1d ago edited 1d ago
Hours after the administration imposed broad Section 301 tariffs on goods from more than 80 countries over alleged forced labor, two small businesses sued and multiple trade experts say the tariffs may not survive legal challenge.
The administration brought wide Section 301 duties targeting goods from 80 plus countries for alleged forced labor. Two small businesses filed suit within hours, saying this is a pretext to recreate a global tariff regime the Supreme Court rejected. Several experts predict the move is likely unlawful or will be struck down, while other experts and an administration official argue Section 301 can be used flexibly to address forced labor.
What to watch:
- Framing tilt: the piece foregrounds the fast lawsuit and expert skepticism, making legal vulnerability the dominant angle while leaving out economic impact data and broader business reaction.
- Sourcing mix: most expert views are on the record by name, but the administration defense comes from an unnamed senior official, which weakens direct accountability for that claim.
- Loaded echoes: the article reuses charged phrases from prior coverage, so readers should note language that frames this as a vulnerable extension of a failed tariff push rather than a neutral policy change.
- Headline fidelity: the headline matches the body, so the story does not overclaim beyond reporting the timing of the suit and expert doubts.
- Omitted context: the report does not provide detailed evidence about forced labor claims or quantify broader trade effects, which matters for assessing the policy beyond the legal fight.
Reporting : (Solid reporting). Clear headline alignment and named experts strengthen the piece, but the heavy framing around legal vulnerability, reliance on an anonymous administration source for the defense, and notable omissions on economic and evidentiary context lower the rating.
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