(BBC News) US President Donald Trump can keep collecting import taxes, an appeals court has ruled, a day after a trade ruling found the sweeping global tariffs to be illegal.
A federal appeals court granted a bid from the White House to temporarily suspend the lower court’s order, which ruled that Trump had overstepped his power by imposing the international duties.
Wednesday’s judgement from the US Court of International Trade drew the ire of Trump officials, who said it was an example of judicial overreach.
Small businesses and a group of states had challenged the measures, which are at the heart of Trump’s economic and international agendas.
In its appeal, the Trump administration said the decision issued by the trade court a day earlier had improperly second-guessed the president and threatened to unravel months of hard-fought trade negotiations.
“The political branches, not courts, make foreign policy and chart economic policy,” it said in the filing, which threatened to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court if the earlier ruling was not put on hold.
Shortly before Thursday’s tariff reprieve from the appeals court, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told a press briefing: “America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president, for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges.
“The legal battle placed a question mark over the fate of the tariffs, which have rattled the global economy since the White House began warning of the measures earlier this year.
In February, Trump ordered tariffs on goods from China, Mexico and Canada, saying the move was intended to help address a fentanyl crisis.
Then last month, he unveiled a blanket 10% tariff on goods from most countries around the world, with higher duties on products from certain trade partners, including the European Union and China, considered “bad actors” by the administration.
The White House has since suspended or revised parts of many of those proclamations, while it pursues trade negotiations.
The appeals court decision to keep the tariffs in place for now did not weigh in on the broader questions of the case, which will continue to be litigated. The next hearing in the case is on June 5.
Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said even if the White House loses its appeal, it remained committed to tariffs.
“You can assume that even if we lose, we will do it another way,” he said on Thursday.
Navarro noted that the lower court’s decision rejected the emergency law that Trump invoked to implement the tariffs, and not the import taxes specifically.
Its ruling did not affect other tariffs that Trump has imposed on specific materials such as steel, aluminium and cars, which were justified using different legal authorities.
