Last month, a bipartisan proposal in the House of Representatives called for Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum to be dropped unless Congress approved them within 75 days of the bill's enactment, and also restricted presidents' ability to hike tariffs under the guise of national security going forward.
Liquidation may not be final in cases where CBP is "acting at the behest of another agency," law firm Neville Peterson said in a Sept. 13 blog post commenting on the Court of International Trade's ruling in AM/NS Calvert v. U.S. In that decision, the trade court entries subject to Section 232 steel and aluminum duties may not be final, given that the case contests the applications of product-specific exclusions granted by the Commerce Department and not by CBP (see 2309070037).
The Court of International Trade in a Sept. 6 opinion rejected a U.S. motion to dismiss cases from three importers challenging the Commerce Department's denial of their Section 233 steel tariff exclusion requests. The government said the cases should be tossed since they concern entries that already had been finally liquidated, but Judge M. Miller Baker held that it's possible for the court to order liquidation in Administrative Procedure Act cases brought under Section 1581(i), even if liquidation is final.
Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies expect the U.S. will get "a taste of its own medicine” when China appeals its loss over Section 232 retaliatory tariffs at the World Trade Organization, adding that China likely won't have to drop the tariffs since there is no appellate body to take that appeal.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is proposing changes to the exclusion process for Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs to improve the accuracy of exclusion requests and objections, and generally improve the efficiency of the process, the agency said.
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Former President Donald Trump is considering making hiking tariffs on all imports a plank of his reelection campaign, as he discussed recently on Fox Business. According to a Washington Post story, although Trump said on TV that he liked the idea of a 10% duty on all imports, he has not settled on a number yet. Trump's former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in January 2021 that all countries should have a 10% to 12% tariff on all imports, with higher tariffs for particularly important products (see 2101260048).
A World Trade Organization dispute panel rejected China's claim that its retaliatory tariffs in response to Section 232 tariffs were justified because the U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs were a safeguard in disguise.
Failure to maintain a "robust system" of submitting and monitoring their own Section 232 exclusions could cost importers millions of dollars in "duty savings opportunities," said a blog post from law firm Crowell & Moring Aug. 15. A new report from the Government Accountability Office that found more than $32 million in unpaid Section 232 duties on steel and aluminum because the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security and CBP hadn't detected that the exclusion had been filed (see 2307210064).
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo that she should not intervene in professional staff's determination of whether antidumping and countervailing duties -- they range from 43% to 294% -- should be imposed on imported tin mill steel products, used in making cans for packaging food.