Lose-lose: even if the Supreme Court strikes Trump’s prices, consumers would probably not see a penny from reimbursements

“We have thousands of dollars in our country,” Trump said on Wednesday. “If we had no prices, we would be a very poor nation and we would have enjoyed all the other countries in the world, the friend and the enemy.”

But two courts have now judged that its most important and daring import taxes are illegal. If the Supreme Court accepts them and strikes them for good, the federal government may have to reimburse many of the taxes it has already collected with companies that import foreign products in the United States.

“We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars potentially in reimbursements affecting thousands and thousands of importers,” said business lawyer Luis Arandia, partner of Barnes & Thornburg’s law firm. “Debt everything that will be the greatest administrative effort in the history of the American government.”

Ordinary Americans, who had to pay higher prices on certain products due to prices, are unlikely to share the windfall. Any reimbursement would rather go to companies that have paid the samples in the first place.

Refunds would also cancel the flow of pricing income on which the president counted to help pay the massive tax bill he signed on July 4 and would threaten, to literally destroy the United States of America “.

In question, income is received from the prices that Trump imposed this year by invoking the 1977 law on emergency economic powers (IEEPA). A set of IEPA prices has targeted almost all countries on earth after declaring that massive and persistent trade deficits in the United States constituted a national emergency. Another aimed at Canada, China and Mexico and aimed to counter the illegal flow of drugs and immigrants across American borders.

But a specialized federal commercial court in New York judged in May that the president had exceeded his authority by ignoring the congress and imposing the prices of the ieepa. The American court of appeal for the federal circuit last week has largely confirmed the decision -making court, although it also ordered the lower court to reconsider if there was a legal correction unless it completely reduces the prices.

The appeal judges also interrupted their own decision until mid -October to give the administration time to call on the Supreme Court – something he did on Wednesday. General solicitor D. John Sauer asked the judges to take over the case and hear arguments in early November.

If the high courtyard strikes the IEEPA prices, importers may be entitled to reimbursements. The American Customs and Front Protection Agency reports that it had collected more than $ 72 billion in IEPA prices until August 24.

For importers, Ted Murphy, co-leader of international trade in the law firm Sidley Austin, “said:” This is what you are going to have to make the refund.

“And the options are all of nothing – the government can simply reimburse it automatically; I do not think this is likely, but it is an option. There could be an administrative process, so you must go to customs and border protection and request a refund of your IEPA prices. Or you may have to submit your own legal file. ” ‘

There is a precedent for the courts to set up a system to make companies their money in commercial affairs. In the 1990s, the courts canceled the maintenance costs of the unconstitutional port on exports and set up a system that exporters apply to recover their money.

“Companies have obtained reimbursements,” said Murphy. A hitch: in this case, the government did not have to pay interest on the tax it has collected and had to repay. It is not clear if the government should pay interest on the price reimbursements of the IEEPA.

The Trump administration could go back to reimburse the prices it has collected. Trump has already said that he did not want to reimburse the money, by publishing on his social media site in August that it “would again be in 1929, a great depression!”

“I foresee that if the administration was losing, they would turn around and begin to explain why it would be impossible to reimburse everyone,” Brent Skorup, a legal researcher at Libertarian Cato Institute, told Brenta. “I think there will be a lot of disputes on the nature of the reimbursements and which has a right. And I expect the administration to raise all kinds of objections. ”

To ensure that they can successfully claim reimbursements, said Clinton Yu, a partner of Barnes & Thornberg, “importers really need to have their files in order.”

Adding to uncertainty is the chaotic way that Trump has deployed his prices – announcing and then delaying them, sometimes evoking new. Sometimes the administration decided that importers who have already paid one of its prices do not have to pay another.

The prices are paid by importers who often try to transmit the cost to their customers thanks to higher prices. But consumers would have no appeal to request reimbursements for the higher prices they had to pay.

“It is the importer of the record which is legally responsible for paying prices and prices,” said Arandia. “They would be the only ones to stand up to recover this money.”

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The writers of the AP Lindsay Whitehurst and Josh Boak contributed to this story.

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