The Trump administration has cycled through trade law after trade law as it tries to find a sound legal basis to impose the steep tariffs on foreign products that President Trump wants.
It is poised to try yet another approach.
A global 10 percent tariff that Mr. Trump imposed in February after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier global tariffs is set to lapse at 12:01 a.m. on Friday. The administration has a new batch of tariffs ready to go to replace it, which could be announced as soon as Thursday.
In June, the administration proposed imposing those new tariffs on 59 countries and the 27-nation European Union, citing their failure to pass or enforce laws banning goods made with forced labor from their countries. The tariffs would be issued under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, and set at 10 to 12.5 percent. They would apply to countries supplying more than 99 percent of U.S. imports — effectively recreating the expiring 10 percent global tariff.
More duties are likely to be on the way after that. The administration has proposed another batch of tariffs, also under Section 301, on 15 countries and the European Union to offset what the White House calls unfair practices in their manufacturing sectors.
The administration also turned to another obscure trade law earlier this week, when Mr. Trump signed orders to impose a 50 percent tariff on billions of dollars of Canadian exports. The law, the Tariff Act of 1930, also known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, was written by Congress to shield American businesses during the onset of the Great Depression, though many historians believe it actually deepened the crisis. The Section 338 provision of the act that the administration used this week had never been used to impose tariffs.
Mr. Trump has long maintained that U.S. tariffs on imports were unfairly low, and he came into office wanting to transform that system. But his efforts have been met with plenty of stops, starts and setbacks, reflecting the fact that a president’s legal authority over tariff policy is in some ways limited.
