The US Court of International Trade in a July 14 ruling said US President Donald Trump's decision to impose additional duties on imports of Turkish steel under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 was in violation of the law.
Imposing the additional duties "violates statutorily mandated procedures and the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law," the court said in its opinion.
Following a tweet from Trump, the US on August 13, 2018 raised Turkey's steel import tariff to 50% from the 25% assigned to all countries without an individual negotiated deal in March 2018. In his tweet on August 10, 2018, Trump said he was authorizing "a doubling of tariffs on steel and aluminum with respect to Turkey as their currency, the Turkish Lira, slides rapidly downward against our very strong dollar."
The higher tariffs remained in place until May 21, 2019.
Plaintiff Transpacific Steel, a US importer of steel, requested a refund of the additional tariffs it paid as a result of the higher tariffs. The plaintiffs argued the move to double Turkey's steel tariffs was unlawful as it lacked a nexus to national security, was issued without following mandated statutory procedures, and singled out importers of Turkish steel products in violation of Fifth Amendment Equal Protection and Due Process guarantees.
The court found that raising the tariff level on Turkey violated the timeline of the Section 232 statute as it requires the President to make a decision based on the Secretary of Commerce's report within 90 days and then implement any chosen action within 15 days.
"The government continues to argue that the President is permitted to modify his previous proclamation, but as we have already said, '[t]he President's expansive view of his power under Section 232 is mistaken, and at odds with the language of the statute, its legislative history, and its purpose," the court said in its opinion.
"Contrary to the government's contention, there is nothing in the statute to support the continuing authority to modify proclamations outside of the stated timelines. The government offers no citation to the statute nor to the recent legislative history to support this theory," the court added.
Given changes made to the Section 232 statute over the years, the court held that regardless of whether modifications were permissible before, modifications of existing proclamations under the current statutory scheme, without following the procedures in the statute, were not permitted, the court said.
"The President is not authorized to act under Section 232 based on any off-handed suggestion by the Secretary; the statute requires a formal investigation and report," the court said in its opinion.
