Author of America’s tariff statute: Trump’s tariffs are illegal

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Ambassador Alan Wolff says President Donald Trump’s novel implementation of America’s tariff law is illegal and runs counter to how Congress intended the presidential power to be used.

Wolff would know. He wrote the law.

“I have a sense of ownership of the statute,” said Wolff, who served as the Nixon administration’s lead international trade lawyer and drafted what eventually became Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. “I have a long history with it. And it’s being misused.”

That argument is about to be tested.

On September 30, the Court of International Trade will hear a case that challenges Trump’s latest tariff strategy. The plaintiff: The Liberty Justice Center, which sued the Trump administration and won, when the Supreme Court ruled in February that the president had no authority to use his emergency powers to enact tariffs.

Among the Liberty Justice Center’s arguments: Trump is claiming authority not provided to him by the statute Wolff drafted.

While Wolff served in the Nixon administration, the White House grew frustrated with its inability to respond to exploding competition from Japan, particularly in electronics, while American manufacturers struggled to export goods back to Japan. The relevant authority to retaliate, Section 252 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, was limited to agricultural products.

In need of a bill that would give the president broader authority to respond to specific trade barriers, the Nixon administration and Congress created Section 30, which gave the White House power to investigate a country for anticompetitive actions and respond in kind to force the offending trading partner to the negotiating table. It eventually allowed the United States to place 100% tariffs on Japanese electronics, an action that led the two countries to reach a significant trade agreement.

That context for the drafting of Section 301 is key, Wolff argues. That tariff authority Congress transferred to the president was designed to be limited to a singular trade action and an individual country. That’s why the statue includes the term “foreign country,” singular, and not “countries,” plural, as in other statutes that deal with multilateral agreements.

“The notion that you can write your own tariff against anyone and anybody is offensive,” Wolff said. “This isn’t what we intended.”

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Nevertheless, Trump is using Section 301 to do exactly that: He’s levying tariffs on just about every US trading partner.

To resuscitate its collapsed tariff regime, the Trump administration has claimed that Section 301, with its lack of time limits or upper bounds for tariffs, affords the president carte blanche to place tariffs on any country the White House determines has disadvantaged America in trade.

In June, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer published a 98-page report detailing the result of a monthslong investigation into trading partners’ policies on buying goods made with forced labor. After a public comment period, the USTR in July issued a ruling that dozens of countries directly or indirectly supported forced labor. As a punishment for those actions, which the USTR said harms US commerce, Trump placed tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on more than 60 countries.

“The USTR sort of bundled together 60 countries, created a unique standard that no country could or did meet and said that we’re retaliating against something and acting unilaterally against something we’ve had no interest in historically,” Wolff said. “Congress doesn’t just give wholesale authority to the executive branch – and it didn’t in this case.”

The Liberty Justice Center that believes in some ways, its argument in the upcoming hearing is even more straightforward than the one last year that ultimately overturned the bulk of Trump’s previous tariffs.

The administration has repeatedly stated that its intention with its recent Section 301 investigation and implementation was to restore the universal tariffs that it lost. And its actions backed up its statements: Immediately after the Supreme Court case, Trump put in place a universal 10% tariff using Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. Five months later, right after the Section 122 tariffs expired, the Trump administration implemented its Section 301 tariffs.

“It’s clearly showing a pretextual basis for the tariffs,” said Sara Albrecht, CEO of the Liberty Justice Center. “It’s like: ‘duh.’ I don’t know how many statements we’ve collected from the administration, but every time they speak about this, we put it in a brief.”

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Three former top government trade lawyers – including Wolff; former US Trade Representative to President George H.W. Bush, Carla Hills; and former President Ronald Reagan’s USTR general counsel, Warren Maruyama – wrote a “friend of the court” brief in support of the Liberty Justice Center this month.

They say the Trump administration’s allegations of forced labor as a basis for the tariffs is spurious, the required investigations were inadequate – if carried out at all – and the tariffs weren’t designed to get the supposedly offending countries to prove they’ve discontinued their practices to seek relief from the tariffs.

“The resulting tariffs should be set aside as contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious,” they wrote in their brief.

If the president really wanted to effect change on forced labor, Wolff noted that Trump has another authority: ban trade with offending partners. That would get their attention.

That’s why Section 301 was written without an upper bound to a tariff rate, he said.

“You don’t need to have an upper limit if you can also have a ban,” Wolff said. “It never occurred to us. It was designed to force agreements. And it worked.”

He’s used the same Section 301 authority to increase Brazilian tariffs to 37.5%, citing a history of human rights abuses. And he has launched a trade war with Canada, increasing tariffs on select items to 50% using a different, never-before-used tariff authority: Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. And Greer’s office is also investigating more than a dozen countries for excess manufacturing capacity.

Wolff said he’s concerned that if Liberty Justice Center is victorious again, the Trump administration will find another tariff authority to replace Section 301.

“That certainly worries me,” Wolff said. “But the only thing you can do in response? You fight back.”

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艾伦·沃尔夫大使表示，唐纳德·特朗普总统对美国关税法的创新性实施是非法的，并且违背了国会赋予总统权力的初衷。

沃尔夫肯定知道。法律就是他制定的。

“我对这项法规有一种归属感，”沃尔夫说道。他曾担任尼克松政府的首席国际贸易律师，并起草了最终成为1974年《贸易法》第301条的内容。“我与它有着很深的渊源。而它现在却被滥用了。”

这一论点即将受到检验。

9月30日，国际贸易法院将审理一起挑战特朗普最新关税策略的案件。原告是自由正义中心，该中心曾起诉特朗普政府并胜诉。今年2月，最高法院裁定总统无权动用紧急权力征收关税。

自由正义中心提出的论点之一是：特朗普声称拥有沃尔夫起草的法令并未赋予他的权力。

沃尔夫在尼克松政府任职期间，白宫对无力应对来自日本的爆炸式竞争感到沮丧，尤其是在电子产品领域，而美国制造商却难以将产品出口回日本。当时，美国采取报复措施的相关授权——1962年《贸易扩展法》第252条——仅限于农产品。

为了赋予总统更大权力应对具体贸易壁垒，尼克松政府和国会制定了第30条，赋予白宫调查一国反竞争行为的权力，并采取对等措施迫使违规贸易伙伴重返谈判桌。该条款最终使美国得以对日本电子产品征收100%的关税，而这一举措最终促使两国达成了一项重要的贸易协议。

沃尔夫认为，第301条的起草背景至关重要。国会赋予总统的这项关税授权旨在仅限于单一贸易行动和单一国家。因此，该条款使用了单数形式的“外国”，而不是像其他涉及多边协议的法规那样使用复数形式的“各国”。

沃尔夫说：“认为你可以随意制定针对任何人的关税政策，这种想法令人愤慨。这并非我们的本意。”

为什么加拿大的关税政策可能会影响中期选举的天平？

然而，特朗普正在利用第 301 条款来达到这个目的：他几乎对所有美国贸易伙伴征收关税。

为了重振其崩溃的关税制度，特朗普政府声称，第 301 条款缺乏时间限制或关税上限，赋予总统全权对白宫认定在贸易中损害美国利益的任何国家征收关税。

今年6月，美国贸易代表杰米森·格里尔发布了一份长达98页的报告，详细阐述了历时数月对贸易伙伴购买强迫劳动产品政策的调查结果。经过公众评议期后，美国贸易代表办公室于7月发布裁决，认定数十个国家直接或间接支持强迫劳动。作为对这些行为的惩罚（美国贸易代表办公室称这些行为损害了美国商业），特朗普对60多个国家加征了10%至12.5%的关税。

沃尔夫说：“美国贸易代表办公室将60个国家捆绑在一起，制定了一项任何国家都无法或没有达到的独特标准，然后声称我们要对某些事情进行报复，并单方面采取行动，而我们历史上对某些事情根本不感兴趣。国会不会无缘无故地将权力授予行政部门——而这次也没有。”

自由正义中心认为，在某些方面，其在即将举行的听证会上的论点甚至比去年最终推翻特朗普此前大部分关税的论点更加直接。

特朗普政府一再声明，其近期启动的301条款调查和实施的目的是恢复其失去的普遍关税。而其行动也印证了这一说法：最高法院裁决后，特朗普立即援引1974年《贸易法》第122条，实施了10%的普遍关税。五个月后，即122条款关税到期后，特朗普政府又立即实施了301条款关税。

“这显然表明关税政策存在借口，”自由正义中心首席执行官萨拉·阿尔布雷希特说。“这简直是废话。我不知道我们从政府那里收集了多少份声明，但他们每次谈到这个问题，我们都会把它写进简报里。”

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本月，三位前政府高级贸易律师——包括沃尔夫；前美国贸易代表、老布什总统的卡拉·希尔斯；以及前总统罗纳德·里根的美国贸易代表办公室总法律顾问沃伦·丸山——撰写了一份“法庭之友”简报，以支持自由正义中心。

他们表示，特朗普政府以强迫劳动为由征收关税的指控是虚假的，必要的调查不足——即便进行了调查——而且关税的目的并非是要让所谓的违规国家证明它们已经停止了这些做法，从而寻求关税减免。

他们在简报中写道：“由此产生的关税应被撤销，因为它们违反法律，而且是任意妄为的。”

沃尔夫指出，如果总统真的想改变强迫劳动问题，特朗普还有另一项权力：禁止与存在强迫劳动行为的伙伴进行贸易。这才能引起他们的重视。

他说，正因如此，第 301 条款才没有规定关税税率的上限。

沃尔夫说：“如果可以同时实施禁令，就没必要设定上限了。我们从未想过这一点。这项规定旨在促成协议的达成。而且它奏效了。”

他援引《1930年关税法》第301条的授权，将巴西的关税提高到37.5%，理由是巴西存在侵犯人权的历史。他还对加拿大发动了贸易战，利用一项从未动用过的关税授权——1930年《关税法》第338条——将部分商品的关税提高到50%。此外，格里尔的办公室还在调查十几个国家是否存在产能过剩的问题。

沃尔夫表示，他担心如果自由正义中心再次获胜，特朗普政府将找到另一项关税授权来取代第 301 条款。

“这当然让我很担心，”沃尔夫说。“但你唯一能做的就是反击。”