Trump Already Hit With Lawsuit Over Tariffs—From Unexpected Group
It appears that literally no one is happy with Donald Trump’s tariffs.

A right-wing group with financial ties to Leonard Leo and the Koch network is aiming to halt Donald Trump’s tariff plan.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance sued the president Thursday, claiming that Trump’s decision to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not give him the power to “usurp” Congress’s right to control tariffs or “upset the Constitution’s separation of powers.”
In a press release, the group argued that the emergency statute “authorizes specific emergency actions like imposing sanctions or freezing assets to protect the United States from foreign threats.”
“It does not authorize the President to impose tariffs,” the NCLA wrote.
“Congress has sole authority to control tariffs, which it has done by passing detailed tariff statutes. The President cannot bypass those statutes by invoking ‘emergency’ authority in another statute that does not mention tariffs,” the group continued. “His attempt to use the IEEPA this way not only violates the law as written, but it also invites application of the Supreme Court’s Major Questions Doctrine, which tells courts not to discern policies of ‘vast economic and political significance’ in a law without explicit congressional authorization.”
The NCLA further argued that Trump had massively overstepped his presidential powers by leaning on the wartime statute.
“In its nearly 50-year history, no other president—including President Trump in his first term—has ever tried to use the IEEPA to impose tariffs,” they wrote. “NCLA’s lawsuit does not quibble with President Trump’s declaration of an opioid-related emergency, but it does take issue with his decision to impose tariffs in response, without legal authority to do so.”
The group sued Trump on behalf of Simplified, a Florida-based home goods company whose business relies on imported materials from China, arguing that Trump’s move to impose even more tariffs on China would crush the company’s profits. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, the NCLA asked the court to declare the tariff unlawful, vacate the increase reflected in the U.S. tariff schedule, and effectively block the tariff in its entirety.
“By invoking emergency power to impose an across-the-board tariff on imports from China that the statute does not authorize, President Trump has misused that power, usurped Congress’s right to control tariffs, and upset the Constitution’s separation of powers,” stated NCLA senior litigation counsel Andrew Morris.