By Marissa Ventrelli | Denver Gazette
Colorado has joined a multistate lawsuit against the Trump administration for imposing tariffs on about 90 different countries, Attorney General Phil Weiser and Gov. Jared Polis announced Wednesday.
Weiser and Polis said the tariffs are “destroying our economy, increasing costs on Americans, plunging markets, and putting America on the track to a recession.”
The president has argued that the tariffs would reverse decades of what he called unfair treatment in the form of a trade deficit by the rest of the world. His trade policy, he said, would result in factories and jobs moving back to the United States.
The states on the suit included Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, and New York.
“Coloradans are already starting to feel the effects of the Trump tariffs, with rising prices to consumers and the State of Colorado resulting from them,” said Weiser. “Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to tax and impose tariffs and there is no ‘emergency’ that justifies the Trump tariffs. We are challenging these tariffs in court because they are illegal and, as one study concluded, they will ‘increase inflation, result in nearly 800,000 lost jobs, and shrink the American economy by $180 billion a year’.”
The lawsuit challenges the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration last month, when the administration charged an additional 25% on products from Canada and Mexico and a baseline of 10% on products from other parts of the world. The suit also challenges Trump’s plan to raise tariffs on imports from 46 other countries in July.
The lawsuit alleges Trump’s actions are unconstitutional under Article I of the Constitution, which states that only Congress has the power to impose and collect “taxes, duties, imposts and excises.”
The Trump Administration insisted it has the power to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. State attorneys general argued that the law only applies when an emergency presents “unusual and extraordinary threat” from a foreign entity and does not give the president the authority to impose tariffs.