Although President-elect Joe Biden has said he wants to focus on domestic issues before turning to trade, Brian Pomper, a former chief international trade counsel when the Senate Finance Committee was controlled by Democrats, said he's going to have to deal with trade right away if the Trump administration imposes tariffs on France on Jan. 1 over its digital services tax proposal.
There are still three pending Section 232 investigations, and the one on downstream electrical steel products is already at the White House, so you shouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration hikes tariffs on more products on the way out the door, according to Halie Craig, the former trade staffer for Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. Craig, who was speaking on behalf of the R Street Institute, a pro-market think tank, also said she wonders if there will be more action against China, since the country is not on track to meet its phase one purchase targets.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Nov. 2-8:
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from Nov. 2-6 in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
A Joe Biden administration is seen by many as likely to return the U.S. to a more traditional approach to international trade, but there's much still unknown about how and when an unwinding of the Trump administration's policies would occur. Biden would be able to make meaningful changes around trade regardless of whether Republicans retain Senate control, and there is an expectation that he would undertake a “review” of Trump's trade remedies, including under sections 232 and 301, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
The U.S. government is moving too slowly in the processing of refunds of duties paid on imported steel from Turkey that were subject to additional Section 232 tariffs, Transpacific Steel said in a Nov. 4 filing with the Court of International Trade. Transpacific was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit over the tariffs. A three-judge CIT panel ruled that the tariffs were improperly imposed because they were put in place after the statutory timelines for Section 232 tariffs (see 2007140046). A government appeal filed in September with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is awaiting a ruling.
Even as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce held out hope for a President Joe Biden rolling back tariffs on imports from countries other than China, it doesn't expect Congress to limit a president's ability to impose tariffs without congressional approval. Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the Chamber and its top policy officer, said that if Biden were to win, “he may choose a slightly different path” on tariffs than Donald Trump has.
The only producer of electrical steel in the U.S., which employs thousands of workers in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, thanked Donald Trump for imposing a Section 232 remedy on laminations and cores that are used to make electric transformers. A press release about its statement, which came out the day before Election Day, did not say whether a tariff or quota would be imposed.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Oct. 26 - Nov. 1:
Peter Navarro, a White House adviser who specializes in trade, argued during a video interview with the Washington Post that a Biden administration would mean a return “to the old globalist ways of shipping our supply chains offshore.” Navarro said during the Oct. 30 interview that blue-collar workers in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania understand that Joe Biden voted for NAFTA and voted to admit China into the World Trade Organization, and that they blame those actions for millions of lost factory jobs. “Trade's one of the keys to unlocking the Midwest battleground states,” Navarro said.