Protect Democracy has filed an amicus brief in support of a challenge to President Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose sweeping and unprecedented tariffs, in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the case Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump.

In the brief, Protect Democracy argues that the executive actions imposing the tariffs under challenge raise virtually every red flag that jurists and scholars have identified in warning about how emergency powers may be abused to undermine democracy. For example, the President has seized an emergency taxing power – a quintessentially legislative power that the Constitution exclusively vests in Congress. Another key red flag is when an emergency action may threaten individual rights and be invoked pretextually to achieve aims that have nothing to do with any arguable “emergency.”

This case implicates yet another concerning pattern: the Executive Branch has been engaged in a broader – and altogether alarming – effort to repudiate longstanding constraints on the exercise of executive power, combined with the administration’s unparalleled efforts to expand emergency powers. For instance, the President has publicly claimed to possess limitless executive power, stating: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” Alongside statements such as this, the President has engaged in an unprecedented expansion of the use of emergency powers in pace, number, and scope. Protect Democracy argues that courts need not close their eyes to this broader context as it relates to the constitutional separation of powers and fundamental checks and balances on abuses of authority.

These red flags should alert courts to the need for close judicial scrutiny for potential abuse of emergency powers. Applying such scrutiny here, Protect Democracy argues that the challenged tariffs abuse congressional delegations of authority to the president to act in true emergencies, extending far beyond what the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) permit, and what Congress intended. The President’s unilateral declaration of a “national emergency” is not a blank check. Both of the statutes the President has invoked – the National Emergencies Act and IEEPA – were enacted to constrict rather than expand the Executive’s emergency powers. Based on the undisputed facts of this case, the so-called “emergency” declared to justify the unprecedented invocation of IEEPA to impose global tariffs has already been deployed in circumstances that do not involve an “emergency” in any ordinary sense of that word.

Protect Democracy has long been concerned about the role of “emergencies” and the use of emergency powers to aggrandize executive power. Protect Democracy has previously filed amicus briefs in two cases at the Supreme Court concerning uses of emergency powers purportedly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. One is Biden v. Nebraska, in which Protect Democracy urged the Court to scrutinize the Biden administration’s use of emergency powers to forgive billions of dollars in student loans. The other is Arizona v. Mayorkas, concerning the Biden administration’s effort to terminate the use of emergency powers as the basis for sidestepping asylum laws and otherwise limiting immigration at the Southern border. Protect Democracy has also filed an amicus brief in a related case involving the President’s use of emergency powers to impose global tariffs in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, V.O.S. Selections v. Trump.