California Sues Trump Over IEEPA Tariffs, Invokes Legislative History of the Statute
The state of California opened a lawsuit in the District Court for the Northern District of California on April 16 against President Donald Trump's ability to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs. The two-count complaint claims that Trump acted beyond his statutory authority granted by IEEPA to impose the "reciprocal" tariffs and the tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico, and that Trump's tariff actions usurp legislative authority in violation of the U.S. Constitution (State of California v. Donald J. Trump, N.D. Cal. # 3:25-03372).
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The suit is the fourth major lawsuit to be brought against the president's use of IEEPA to impose tariffs and the first to be brought by a sovereign entity. California, like litigants in two of the other cases, opted to file suit in a federal district court instead of the Court of International Trade. However, the two cases filed in federal district courts have already faced motions to transfer the matters to the trade court (see 2504150022).
California argued that tariffs "are not among the numerous actions that IEEPA authorizes the President to take under a declared emergency," noting that the word "tariff" doesn't appear in the statute and that IEEPA has never been used to impose tariffs in its history. The complaint said the president "may not rule by fiat" but instead can only rule according to an "act of Congress or from the Constitution itself."
The nation's most populous state invoked the "major questions" doctrine in its complaint -- a legal theory stipulating that the executive can only regulate on questions of major political or economic significance upon explicit delegation from Congress.
The complaint said "where the economic and political significance is as staggering, and the power asserted is so novel and transformative as it is with the unprecedented tariffs that President Trump has imposed here," the president must have "clear congressional authorization" to justify his actions. In making this claim, California cited Biden v. Nebraska, a 2023 Supreme Court case championing the major questions doctrine and striking down President Joe Biden's effort to cancel a host of student loan debt.
"IEEPA provides no such clear congressional authorization for President Trump’s tariffs, nor the vast expansion of Presidential power to tax all goods entering the United States on a whim," the complaint said.
California's complaint leaned heavily on the legislative history of IEEPA, arguing that the statute was meant to narrow the powers the president can wield in times of emergency and limit when such emergencies can be declared. The brief said Congress enacted IEEPA as a "series of reforms to limit presidential authority and to prevent presidential abuse of power."
Congress' focus in the 1970s on checking presidential power followed "U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, revelations of domestic spying, assassinations of foreign political leaders, the Watergate break-in, and other related abuses of power," California said. The Senate formed a bipartisan special committee to "reevaluate delegations of emergency authority to the president," including the Trading With the Enemy Act, IEEPA's predecessor, which was initially enacted to bar trade with Germany and the Central Powers during World War I but invoked over time by various presidents to broadly regulate economic issues "outside the context of a declared war," the brief said.
This bipartisan committee issued a report surveying the president's emergency powers which had meant the U.S. had technically been in a "state of national emergency" since 1933. The committee members questioned whether the U.S. system of government could continue to exist in a "continued state of emergency."
Ultimately, this assessment of executive authority led to two reforms: IEEPA and the National Emergencies Act. The House Committee on International Relations issued a report summarizing the nature of an "emergency" in this new approach as subjecting presidential declarations of emergency to "various substantive restrictions." The main restriction flows from a recognition that "emergencies are by their nature rare and brief, and are not to be equated with normal ongoing problems," the complaint said.
National emergencies should only be declared "with respect to a specific set of circumstances which constitute a real emergency, and for no other purpose," the report said, adding that the emergency "should be terminated in a timely manner when the factual state of emergency is over and not continued in effect for use in other circumstances." California said amendments to TWEA were specifically meant to "limit the ability of presidents to exercise emergency powers unilaterally without proper oversight."
This history, and the structure of the Constitution, prevent Trump from using IEEPA to impose tariffs on every nation in the world, California said.
The court assigned the case to Judge Jacqueline Corley, who joined the court in 2022 upon nomination by President Joe Biden. She previously served as a magistrate judge in the same district court from 2011 to 2022.