Court of International Trade

The Trump administration’s decision to expand a safeguard tariff on imports of solar products, as well as its reversal of an exclusion for bifacial solar panels, may be illegal, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, which says it will consider all options to “reverse” the moves.

President Trump’s Section 232 exclusion process for steel and aluminum products is constitutionally sound and consistent with language in the proclamations the president issued to institute the tariffs, the Justice Department recently told the U.S. Court of International Trade in asking for a challenge to the process to be dismissed.

The U.S. Court of International Trade’s shift to virtual proceedings amid the pandemic has not impacted its ability to successfully move forward with litigation, Judge Gary Katzmann told Inside U.S. Trade this week, though attorneys involved in CIT cases say some important aspects have been lost in the transition.

The Commerce Department is granting exclusions to steel and aluminum tariffs in an unconstitutional and arbitrarily capricious manner that has put a Michigan-based metal importer at a competitive disadvantage, the company argues in a new Section 232 challenge filed with the U.S. Court of International Trade.

The Court of International Trade last week denied a Trump administration motion to dismiss a challenge lodged by a U.S. importer of steel products over the president’s decision last August to ratchet up Section 232 tariffs on steel from Turkey.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is poised to move on a case involving a Section 232 challenge initiated by the American Institute for International Steel after receiving responses from the group and the Trump administration.

The American Institute for International Steel last week brought its Section 232 case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit after the Supreme Court in June declined to hear its argument challenging the constitutionality of the statute used to employ national security-based steel tariffs.

The Supreme Court should heed precedent and not consider an international steel group’s constitutional challenge of the national security-based statute President Trump has used to employ tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, the Justice Department argued this week.

Attorneys representing the Trump administration last week argued that President Trump's decision to double a tariff on Turkish steel imports was legal, saying in a push to dismiss a challenge to his authority that he did not have to obtain a new report from the Commerce Department beforehand.