Federalist Society bigwigs and scholars who came to President Donald Trump’s defense in his various personal criminal cases last year have now thrown their weight behind legal challenges to his ability to impose heavy tariffs.
This week, Federalist Society co-chair Steven Calabresi and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III joined a dozen other college professors and ex-officials asking that a federal judge immediately derail Trump’s “sweeping tariff regime that touches nearly every imported good sold in the United States.”
“Congress, not the president, has the power to impose tariffs,” they wrote. “This dispute is not about the wisdom of tariffs or the politics of trade. It is about who holds the power to tax the American people.”
The move highlights the growing impatience of American entrepreneurs, industrialists and traditional conservatives with the Trump administration’s protectionist policies, which have caused fierce gyrations in global stock markets and initiated a trade war that has vastly lowered U.S. imports from China while ramping up Chinese exports everywhere else. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has framed the policies as “strategic uncertainty.”
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras permitted the band of legal scholars to weigh in on a lawsuit brought by two relatively small, family-owned American companies that design educational toys and pet playthings.
In their amicus brief, the 14 lawyers and former officials argued that Trump has usurped powers he does not have by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act in his April executive orders that imposed “reciprocal tariffs.” On April 8, Trump slapped an additional duty on Chinese goods that raised the total tax to 84 percent — then cranked up the lever to 145 percent the next day — only to announce in a social media post Thursday that “80% Tariff on China seems right! Up to Scott B.,” pinning the decision on the Treasury secretary.
“But no statute authorizes what the President has done. The laws cited permit limited and targeted actions under narrow conditions. They do not authorize sweeping economic realignment. They do not permit unilateral taxation of vast sectors of the U.S. economy. These duties came not from Congress, but from a claim of executive power detached from constitutional limits,” legal scholars wrote.
And they noted that IEEPA, which Trump cites in his various executive orders, was put in place to halt precisely the kind of power grab they see happening now.
“The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the central statute invoked, cannot bear this weight. Enacted in 1977 to rein in presidential overreach, IEEPA allows the president to impose sanctions in response to genuine emergencies—not to reorder the economy in response to long-term trends,” they added.
The group includes several Republicans, including former Virginia Sen. George Allen, former Missouri Sen. John Danforth, and former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Peter J. Wallison at the center-right American Enterprise Institute think tank and numerous experts on constitutional law also signed on.
Calabresi and Meese delivered forceful defenses of Trump last year before federal courts across the country in an ultimately successful attempt to stymie two criminal prosecutions brought by the Department of Justice. They authored various amicus briefs that doubted the legitimacy of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment in an effort to support the notion that Trump enjoyed presidential immunity.
Calabresi co-wrote an authoritative 2003 paper on the unitary executive theory of power, the guiding philosophy of Trump’s second administration that the head of the NYU Brennan Center for Justice has argued “upends our understanding of the Constitution” by adopting a monarchical view of presidential power.
Judge Contreras ruled that the brief signers “have unique information or perspective that can help the Court beyond the help that the lawyers for the parties are able to provide.”
In recent days, Trump has made several remarks about his protectionist policies’ impact on the price of toys, suggesting that children should be content with “two dolls instead of 30” and threatening to specifically target Barbie maker Mattel with a 100 percent tariff as retribution for the company CEO speaking out about the matter.
That tension could raise the profile of this lawsuit, which was brought by a toy maker that specializes in making games that educate young children with science lab sets, develop toddler motor skills with plastic turtles that snap together, and teach computer coding with programmable rolling robots. The toys are designed in the United States but manufactured in China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam and imported directly by the Illinois company.
In their lawsuit, the sister companies Learning Resources and hand2mind said that Trump’s tariffs could force “sharply raising prices, major supply disruptions, and having to revamp or eliminate entire product lines” that threaten their roughly 500 American employees in Vernon Hills, Illinois; Torrance, California; and Amherst, New York.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.