Saying that tariffs from President Donald Trump’s administration “are wreaking chaos on California families,” Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta on Wednesday announced the filing of a federal lawsuit in San Francisco to challenge the legality of the tariffs.
The governor spoke from an almond farm in the Central Valley as the backdrop for discussing the impact of tariffs on California agriculture and small businesses.
According to the lawsuit, California grows 76% of the world’s almonds and exports most of them, contributing $9.2 billion to its gross state product and supporting 110,000 jobs.
Newsom came in hot. It was, in view, “a serious and sober moment … no state has more to lose than the state of California.”
He contended that Trump’s tariffs are causing “immense” harm to California businesses and consumers.
“President Trump’s policies have already inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses,” Newsom said.
As the largest economy in the nation, the tariffs “have an outsized impact on California businesses, including its more than 60,000 small business exporters,” he said.
“Check your 401(k),” Newsom said. “The economic uncertainty is profound.”
He described the tariffs as “the largest tax increase in history.” They were, he added, “reckless at another level.”
He said the impacts of the tariffs “have already forced … me to adjust the budget that I will be submitting in May. The May revision will reflect a downgrade in economic outlook in this state.”
He said Trump had “betrayed” the people of the Central Valley and those who supported him.
“Where is Congress?” he asked rhetorically. “This is the personification of corruption … This is smash mouth in your face every minute of every day … How in the hell are we sitting by and allowing this to happen?
He vowed that neither he nor the state of California would stand by idly.
The new lawsuit filed Wednesday takes dead aim at the tariffs and seeks to declare them unlawful and block their enforcement.
Bonta said the lawsuit was the 14th one his office has filed against the Trump administration in the last 14 weeks. Newsom later added with obvious pride that the state filed or joined 122 lawsuits against the administration during Trump’s first term.
Bonta said that Trump’s actions were “rogue” and the president needed to be “reined in.”
The lawsuit targets the president’s use of the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. The act gives a president power in the case of a national emergency to take a wide range of actions, including the imposition of sanctions, without advance approval from Congress.
The act — first passed in 1977 — authorizes the president to declare a national emergency when there is “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from outside of the United States to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.”
Trump declared a national emergency on April 2, finding that “domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system” created an unusual and extraordinary threat to the country. He used that finding to justify his across-the-board and “reciprocal” tariffs against trading partners worldwide.
Those tariffs joined earlier ones imposed on Mexico and Canada based on other emergencies that resulted from drug trafficking across their borders.
Under the Constitution, the power to impose tariffs is assigned to Congress in the first instance, although it may delegate the power in specific instances. According to the lawsuit, the act itself does not mention the word “tariff” nor clearly delegate the power to impose tariffs to the president.
No president has ever relied on the act to impose tariffs, according to the filing.
The lawsuit invokes the “major questions doctrine,” an approach to understanding and interpreting the allocation of power between branches of government.
The U.S. Supreme Court has relied on the doctrine in recent years to cut back the so-called “administrative state.”
Under the doctrine, when issues are of “major” economic or political importance, they cannot be decided by administrative agencies without clear authority from Congress, according to a 2022 ruling of the high court.
Some scholars have argued that the doctrine could also limit the power of a president to declare a national emergency or take actions because of the emergency if they infringe on the role of Congress under the Constitution. Under the doctrine, the argument goes, the issue would be whether the act “clearly” delegated the president the power to do what he has done.
Bonta said the national emergency declarations in this case were “bogus.”
Declarations of national emergencies under the act are not once-in-a-lifetime events. According to the materials on Congress.gov, the official website for U.S. federal legislative information, there are 42 ongoing national emergencies, and on average, emergencies declared under the act last more than nine years.
The lawsuit particularly focuses on the domestic impact of the tariffs imposed on Mexico, Canada, and China, California’s three largest trading partners.
The lawsuit says that they account for $203 billion of the more than $491 billion in goods imported by California in 2024. Additionally, the suit says, these countries are California’s top three export destinations, buying over one-third of the state’s $183 billion in exported goods in 2024.
In proof of the adage that politics make strange bedfellows, a statement from the governor’s office about the lawsuit quotes Republican U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz (“a tariff is a tax”) and Rand Paul (“Every dollar collected in tariff revenue comes straight out of the pockets of American consumers.”).
The final quote is from the Wall Street Journal’s famously conservative editorial board; it said that the president has starting “The dumbest trade war in history.”
