Name: The Legal Logistics Behind Trump's Lightning-Fast Tariff Process
Uploaded: 2025-04-07T04:00:00Z
Duration: 5 min 6 s
Description: President Trump skipped the normal months-long process to impose tariffs and instead used a 1970s law to bypass them. WSJ’s Gavin Bade explains what that means legally and what Congress might do about it.

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President Trump skipped the normal months-long process to impose tariffs and instead used a 1970s law to bypass them. WSJ’s Gavin Bade explains what that means legally and what Congress might do about it. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250404/1bcbc478-db0a-4693-8976-e1009877804b/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

President Trump skipped the normal months-long process to impose tariffs and instead used a 1970s law to bypass them. WSJ’s Gavin Bade explains what that means legally and what Congress might do about it.

The Legal Logistics Behind Trump's Lightning-Fast Tariff Process

Reciprocal, that means they do it to us and we do it to them.

Typically, imposing tariffs is a months or even years-long process filled with economic analysis, comments and public hearings, not so with this latest round of duties from the Trump administration.

We're gonna have to go through a little tough love maybe, but they all understand they're ripping us off and they understood it.

So under the Constitution, the President is actually not the person who's supposed to be imposing tariffs. That is left up to Congress under Article I. But over decades, Congress has relinquished that authority and empowered the President through multiple laws to impose tariffs and other trade barriers on foreign nations. With those laws, there are standards and processes that the executive branch is supposed to follow when it's imposing tariffs. Typically, these tariff investigations would involve a lengthy process of public comment and notification, a lot of analysis behind the scenes from economic agencies and conversations with private industry and labor unions. All of that will go into a giant tariff report that will be delivered to the President who will then decide whether they actually want to impose these tariffs. So this is not a very fast process, and that has been frustrating not only for President Trump, but for some domestic industries. And so what we've seen President Trump do partially because of those concerns, and partially because he just doesn't like the delay and the technocracy of the process, he's short-circuited that process with a lot of these tariffs in the second term. The primary way that he's done it is by using a completely separate law. This is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or you may have heard of it referred to as IEEPA. Now, this is a law from the 1970s that typically is used for economic sanctions and is a much simpler process. All the President needs to do is declare a national emergency and then they can impose tariffs almost immediately. That is what we saw him do when it came to Canada, Mexico, and China, where he declared a national emergency over fentanyl smuggling.

China makes the fentanyl, you know, China makes the fentanyl, gives it to Mexico, puts it through Canada.

Gavin: And it's what we saw him do with this reciprocal tariff action, arguing that persistent and chronic trade deficits constitutes a national emergency that necessitates tariffs.

Trade deficits are no longer merely an economic problem. They're a national emergency that threatens our security and our very way of life.

Now, that is a legally dubious, I would say, use of the law, if only because it has never been used for tariffs that broadly before. And so there have been people, even people in the White House, the White House Council's office, for instance, who have cautioned his team against using this law for such broad-based tariffs because they think it could be vulnerable to a legal challenge. Typically, there's a very lengthy process for determining a tariff rate, not so in this case, it appears from some sleuthing journalists that the Trump administration has done a very simple calculation on these tariffs, taking the trade deficit that the US has with a particular country and simply dividing it by the amount of imports that we get from that country.

And because we are being very kind, we will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us.

Gavin: They've taken that percentage rate and cut that in half and then made that the new reciprocal tariff rate.

Not a full reciprocal. I could've done that, yes, but it would've been tough for a lot of countries. We didn't wanna do that.

The same day as Trump's tariff announcement, we saw the Senate pass a resolution challenging the President's authority to use the IEEPA law on Canada 'cause they thought that was most politically expedient. And this was interesting because you saw a handful of Republicans join with Democrats to deliver a rebuke to the Trump administration's trade policies.

This is a tax plain and simple. Taxes should not be enacted by one person.

Now it's unclear whether that resolution is going anywhere. House Republicans have used a procedural gimmick to prevent Democrats in that lower chamber from taking up a very similar resolution. But I think symbolically, it does show that there is some growing bipartisan angst and antipathy toward the breadth and aggressiveness of this tariff policy at this point. The very next morning, we saw a new bipartisan bill.

Well, it is time, I believe, for Congress to reassert ourselves in our constitutional duties.

So this very aggressive and quick approach to the tariffs is certainly allowing the President to impose duties much more quickly than he would ever be able to do it in the past, but I think it does leave some open questions as to what are the legal vulnerabilities to these new tariffs, and then I think it also leaves them open to some congressional pushback where Congress says, maybe we start to think about taking some of this trade authority back that we have relinquished to the executive branch.

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