California and 23 other states are suing Trump over new tariffs

from Levi SumagasaiCalMatters

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California and 23 other mostly Democratic states on Thursday sued the Trump administration over the new rationale for the president’s sweeping tariffs.

State Attorney General Rob Bonta is prosecuting the case along with the attorneys general of Oregon, Arizona and New York. They say President Donald Trump’s use of Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which he invoked after the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 20 managed that his use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is unconstitutional – also illegal.

Trump immediately issued 10 percent tariffs across the board after a Supreme Court ruling struck down most of the tariffs he imposed last year.

“He’s desperately grasping at straws,” Bonta said in a virtual news conference Friday. “The president’s justification for these illegal tariffs has gone from preposterous to ridiculous.”

The group filed a lawsuit in the Court of International Trade. It said Section 122 had never been used and could only be used in limited circumstances, such as to address “large and serious balance of payments deficits” and to prevent “imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar,” and that the president’s justifications did not meet those requirements.

“The president is using the authority granted him by Congress to address major international payments problems and to address our country’s large and serious balance of payments deficits,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in an email. “The administration will vigorously defend the president’s actions in court.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was also at the news conference, said the president was “conflating the balance of payments deficit with the trade deficit. Those are two different issues.”

35-p court case explains that the balance of payments—the record of all transactions between U.S. and foreign residents that includes goods, services, income, assets, and liabilities—consists of more than just a trade deficit.

Section 122 also requires tariffs to be applied evenly across products, which the lawsuit says the administration is not doing because Trump’s tariff proclamation includes exemptions for goods from Canada and other countries, as well as many product exemptions.

The attorney general also mentioned that Trump’s tariffs have raised prices for US consumers and businesses. Recent Yale Lab study estimated that the tariffs cost the average household about $1,000 a year.

“President Trump has delivered on the promise to make life more affordable for families, but here he is breaking the law to make life more expensive for Americans,” Bonta said.

In California, the tariffs disrupted businesses and industries including agriculture and winewhose exports have declined, according to the Public Policy Institute of California analysis.

The other states that filed suit are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

On Wednesday, a Court of International Trade judge ruled that companies that paid broad tariffs under the previous law cited by Trump refunds are due.The United States collected more than $264 billion in tariffs in 2025, according to the Tax Foundation. More than $130 billion of the tariffs collected were under the law, which the Supreme Court ruled the president had no authority to use.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.