The administration is circumventing the Supreme Court, dressing its tariff policy in forced‑labor clothes.
On Tuesday, the administration announced new tariffs of 10 to 12.5 percent on imports from 60 countries—covering 99.4 percent of all U.S. imports—after a three‑month investigation found that all of them had failed to ban imports of goods made with forced labor. The tariffs are the first new trade measures since the Court’s February ruling struck down the sweeping “Liberation Day” duties Trump imposed in April 2025, holding that the president lacks unilateral authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad tariffs without congressional approval. The ruling left Trump with a temporary 10 percent global tariff that expires in July unless Congress extends it. Congress has shown no appetite to do so, and the administration knows it.
The administration’s steel‑man argument is simple. The Tariff Act of 1930, Section 307, prohibits the importation of goods produced by forced labor. The Trade Department’s investigation concluded that the sixty trading partners, accounting for 99.4 percent of U.S. imports, have not enacted or enforced a comparable prohibition. Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the president may retaliate against foreign trade practices that are unjustifiable or burden U.S. commerce. The forced‑labor gap, the administration contends, creates an unlevel playing field that harms American workers—and the new tariffs are the lawful remedy. Any administration lawyer before the Court would call this a clean pivot to a surviving statutory predicate.
That steel‑man is textually and operationally incoherent. Section 307 does not grant the executive percentage‑based tariff authority over sixty nations comprising nearly all U.S. imports. The statute authorizes U.S. Customs and Border Protection to detain and exclude specific shipments of goods identified as produced by forced labor. In its ninety‑five‑year enforcement record, it has been used to seize particular merchandise—textiles, minerals, agricultural products—where documented evidence ties production to forced labor. It has never been deployed as a blanket tariff on entire economies. The administration’s reliance on Section 301 to convert a forced‑labor finding into a tariff on all imports from a country is a novel reading that the February ruling all but foreclosed. The Court held that when the president invokes a national‑security or emergency statute to impose broad tariffs that function as economic policy, not as targeted responses to a discrete threat, the action exceeds the authority Congress delegated. This is the same statutory repackaging the administration attempted in April, as we reported then, deployed again under a different legal banner.
The investigation itself betrays the pretext. The Trade Department’s finding that a country lacks a specific statutory prohibition on forced‑labor goods is not a finding that its exports are made by forced labor. The investigation conflates a domestic legal framework with the presence of forced labor in supply chains. Treating the absence of a domestic law as a proxy for forced‑labor goods transforms a targeted customs prohibition into a macroeconomic trade weapon. The uniformity of the penalty—the same tariff rate applied to allies and adversaries alike, covering 99.4 percent of imports—is itself evidence that the exercise was designed to produce a preordained result. No honest investigation into forced labor in international supply chains would find that every major U.S. trading partner is equally complicit and deserving of the same tariff rate.
The administration has not been shy about its intentions. In the aftermath of the February ruling, Trump called the justices “fools” and vowed to find another way. The Trade Representative’s statement on Tuesday, framed in the language of worker protection, is the fulfillment of that vow. The forced‑labor frame allows the administration to argue that it is not ignoring the Court but acting under a different statutory authority. But the argument is a legal Potemkin village: the façade of a legitimate trade remedy, erected over the same protectionist policy the Court already rejected.
Trump is not protecting American workers from forced labor; he is protecting his tariff regime from judicial review. The forced‑labor tariffs are a deliberate evasion of the Supreme Court’s holding that the president cannot unilaterally rewrite U.S. trade law. When the Court struck down the Liberation Day tariffs, it held that Congress, not the executive, sets the nation’s tariff policy. Trump’s forced‑labor tariffs are an attempt to do by other statutory means what the Court said he cannot do by emergency decree. The forced‑labor investigation, however, will have served its purpose: it gave the administration a fig leaf long enough to reimpose tariffs and force Congress’s hand before the temporary measure expires. By then, the damage—to the rule of law, to the separation of powers, and to the trading system—will already have been done.