appeals

June 21 (UPI) — Louisiana can not compel officials to display the Ten Commandments in public school and college classrooms, a federal appeals court has ruled.

“Parents and students challenge a statute requiring public schools to permanently display the Ten Commandments in every classroom in Louisiana. The district court found the statute facially unconstitutional and preliminarily enjoined its enforcement. We affirm,” the appeals court panel said in its 50-page ruling issued this week.

The court ruled Louisiana’s House Bill 71 violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, calling the requirement to display the Ten Commandments “plainly unconstitutional” while affirming a lower court ruling.

“The district court did not abuse its discretion by finding that Plaintiffs satisfied the preliminary injunction elements,” the appeals court wrote, citing a similar law and subsequent ruling in Kentucky in the 1980s.

Last June, Gov. Jeff Landry, R-La., signed the bill, requiring that “each public school governing authority shall display the Ten Commandments in each classroom in each school under its jurisdiction.”

The law went into effect on Jan. 1 of this year but was challenged by a group that included parents and the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.

The appeals court panel agreed the law subjected students to “a state-preferred version of Christianity.”

All but five of the state’s school districts are required to follow the law while the legal process plays out. The five districts where the parent plaintiffs live have a temporary exemption.

“We believe that our children should receive their religious education a thome and within our communities, not from government officials,” Rev. Darcy Roake, one of the plaintiffs in the case said in a statement following the ruling.

“We are grateful for this decision, which honors the religious diversity and religious-freedom rights of public school families across Louisiana,” said Roake, who is a Unitarian Universalist Minister.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has indicated she will now seek appeal from the appeals court’s full judge panel and could attempt to have the case heard in front of the Supreme Court of the United State.

“We strongly disagree with the Fifth Circuit’s affirmance of an injunction preventing five Louisiana parishes from implementing HB71. We will immediately seek relief from the full Fifth Circuit and, if necessary, the United States Supreme Court,” Murrill said in a statement.

“We will immediately seek relief from the full FIfth CIrcuit and, if necessary the United States Supreme Court.”

President Donald Trump hails decision as ‘big win’, but Governor Gavin Newsom promises to pursue legal challenge.

A United States appeals court has ruled the administration of President Donald Trump could keep control of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, over the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The decision on Thursday comes against a backdrop of heightened tensions in California’s largest city, which has become ground zero of Trump’s immigration crackdown across the US.

In a 38-page unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel said Trump was within his rights earlier this month when he ordered 4,000 members of the National Guard into service for 60 days to “protect federal personnel performing federal functions and to protect federal property”.

“Affording appropriate deference to the President’s determination, we conclude that he likely acted within his authority in federalising the National Guard,” the panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeal said.

Trump, a Republican, had appointed two of the judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit panel while his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, had named the third, according to US media reports.

Last week, a lower court judge had ordered Trump to return control of the California National Guard to Newsom, saying the president’s decision to deploy them during protests over federal immigration detentions in Los Angeles was “illegal”. That decision by US District Judge Charles Breyer on June 12 prompted the appeal.

On Thursday night, Trump hailed the appeal court’s decision in a post on his Truth Social social media platform, calling it a “BIG WIN”.

“All over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done,” Trump wrote.

‘Not a king’

The state of California had argued that Trump’s order was illegal because it did not follow the procedure of being issued through the governor.

It was the first time since 1965 that a US president deployed the National Guard over the wishes of a state governor.

The judges said Trump’s “failure to issue the federalisation order directly ‘through’ the Governor of California does not limit his otherwise lawful authority to call up the National Guard”.

But they said the panel disagreed with the defendant’s primary argument that the president’s decision to federalise members of the California National Guard “is completely insulated from judicial review”.

“Nothing in our decision addresses the nature of the activities in which the federalized National Guard may engage,” it wrote in its opinion.

Newsom could still challenge the use of the National Guard and Marines under other laws, including the bar on using troops in domestic law enforcement, it added.

The governor could raise those issues at a court hearing on Friday in front of Breyer, it also said.

In a social media post after the decision, Newsom promised to pursue his challenge.

“Donald Trump is not a king and not above the law,” he wrote.

“Tonight, the court rightly rejected Trump’s claim that he can do whatever he wants with the National Guard and not have to explain himself to a court.

“We will not let this authoritarian use of military soldiers against citizens go unchecked.”

June 20 (UPI) — A federal appeals court ruled late Thursday that President Donald Trump may maintain control of thousands of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles, a blow to the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who is fighting to keep the soldiers off his streets.

The three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was unanimous, ruling that Trump’s order federalizing members of the California National Guard was likely legal.

The court though disagreed with the Trump administration’s argument that the president’s decision to federalize the troops was insulated from judicial review but acknowledged that they must be “highly deferential” to it.

“Affording the President that deference, we conclude that it is likely that the President lawfully exercised his statutory authority,” the court said in its 38-page ruling, though it added “nothing in our decision addresses the nature of the activities in which the federalized National Guard may engage.”

The panel included two Trump-appointed judges, Mark Bennett and Eric Miller, and President Joe Biden appointee Jennifer Sung.

The ruling stays a lower court’s order that had directed the Trump administration to remove the troops deployed to Los Angeles streets.

Trump celebrated the ruling as a “BIG WIN” on his Truth Social media platform.

“The Judges obviously realized that Gavin Newscum is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin, because all over the United States ,if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable , for whatever reason to get the job done,” Trump said in the post, referring to the California governor by an insulting moniker he invented.

Trump — who campaigned on mass deportations while using incendiary and derogatory rhetoric as well as misinformation about immigrants — has been leading a crackdown on immigration since returning to the White House.

On June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began conducting raids in Los Angeles, prompting mass protests in the city.

In response, Trump deployed some 2,000 California National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to quell the demonstrations and to protect ICE agents performing immigration arrests. The number of troops deployed has since increased to 4,000, despite protests having abated.

The deployment was met with staunch opposition, criticism of Trump for continuing an extreme right-wing slide into authoritarianism and a lawsuit from Newsom, who was initially awarded a stay ordering the troops to be removed from the Los Angeles streets.

However, an appeals court hours later issued a preliminary injunction, which late Thursday was made a stay.

Newsom, in a statement, expressed disappointment over the ruling while highlighting the court’s rejection of Trump’s argument that his decision to deploy the troops is beyond judicial review.

“The President is not a king and is not above the law,” Newsom said, vowing to continue to fight the deployment in court.

“We will press forward with our challenge to President Trump’s authoritarian use of U.S. military soldiers against citizens.”

The deployment by Trump is the first by a president without a governor’s permission since 1965.

June 19 (UPI) — An appeals court on Wednesday ruled against the Justice Department’s attempt to replace President Donald Trump as the defendant in a multimillion-dollar defamation case.

Trump is fighting a 2023 defamation judgment ordering him to pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for denying that he sexually assaulted her at a New York City department store in the mid-1990s.

Though the president denies the assault, he was found liable for sexual abuse and then for defaming her by denying the assault after she made it public.

The Department of Justice had asked the court for permission to substitute itself as the defendant in the appeal under the Westfall Act, a mechanism that allows the United States to defend claims against federal officers and employees when the alleged offense occurred within the scope of their duties.

Federal prosecutors argued that Trump was president during his first term in 2017 when he first denied sexually abusing Carroll.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued its denial of the Justice Department’s request in a brief order Wednesday stating: “The Court will issue an opinion detailing its reasoning in due course.”

The ruling is the latest setback in Trump’s fight against paying Carroll the judgement.

Late last week, the same court rejected Trump’s attempt to get a retrial challenging the $5 million civil judgement he was ordered by a jury to pay Carroll.

Trump has long accused the Justice Department of being politically weaponized against him, and a spokesperson for his legal team issued a statement Wednesday rejecting the ruling.

“The American People are supporting President Trump in historic numbers, and they demand an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll Hoaxes, the defense of which the Attorney General has determined is legally required to be taken over by the Department of Justice because Carroll based her false claims on the President’s official acts, including statements from the White House,” the spokesperson said, The Hill reported.

June 13 (UPI) — The California National Guard will remain on the streets of downtown Los Angeles on Friday after an appeals court put an order from a federal judge to remove the soldiers on hold only hours after it was decreed.

The fifth night of a curfew in one square mile of downtown Los Angeles began Friday night. Mayor Karen Bass first imposed the curfew for most people beginning Tuesday night after protests against immigration enforcement operations became violent, including property damage.

President Donald Trump federalized thousands of National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Newsom filed suit against the order, saying it was illegal.

“The court has received the government’s emergency motion for stay pending appeal,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote late Thursday after the Trump administration requested a delay.

“The request for an administrative stay is granted,” the circuit judges continued in a single-page, six-sentence order that stops a temporary restraining order that had President Donald Trump relinquishing control of the state’s National Guard away from California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Trump posted to his Truth Social account Friday: “The appeals court ruled last night that I can use the National Guard to keep our cities, in this case Los Angeles, safe. If I didn’t send the military into Los Angeles, that city would be burning to the ground right now. We saved L.A. Thank you for the decision!!!”

Trump had been stopped, albeit briefly, from the deployment of those troops in the state’s largest city other than protecting federal buildings.

Newsom had filed suit against Trump, who federalized 4,000 members of the Guard and sent them to Los Angeles to stand against demonstrators protesting raids by Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents that began last week.

Newsom, the rightful commander-in-chief of the California National Guard when it is under state control, was not informed or involved with Trump’s action, and filed that suit to strike it down.

U,S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled on the initial filing Thursday, and issued a temporary restraining order that stated Trump’s deployment of the Guard to police the city’s streets likely violated the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which bars federal overreach.

“It is well-established that the police power is one of the quintessential powers reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment,” Breyer wrote in his ruling.

Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, further added that the “citizens of Los Angeles face a greater harm from the continued unlawful militarization of their city, which not only inflames tensions with protesters, threatening increased hostilities and loss of life, but deprives the state for two months of its own use of thousands of National Guard members to fight fires, combat the fentanyl trade and perform other critical functions.”

The Trump administration appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which put a hold on Breyer’s order until at least Tuesday at noon, and allows the White House to keep the Guard on active patrol in Los Angeles.

Newsom has not publicly commented as of yet on the Ninth Circuit’s stay of Breyer’s order, but California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office issued a statement that called the administrative stay “unnecessary and unwarranted in light of the district court’s extensive reasoning.”

After the district judge’s decision, Newsom posted on X: “The court has ruled. @RealDonaldTrump you must relinquish your authority of the National Guard back to me and back to California.”

NEW YORK — As President Trump focuses on global trade deals and dispatching troops to aid his immigration crackdown, his lawyers are fighting to erase the hush money criminal conviction that punctuated his reelection campaign last year and made him the first former — and now current — U.S. president found guilty of a crime.

On Wednesday, that fight landed in a federal appeals court in Manhattan, where a three-judge panel heard arguments in Trump’s long-running bid to get the New York case moved from state court to federal court so he can then seek to have it thrown out on presidential immunity grounds.

It’s one way he’s trying to get the historic verdict overturned.

The judges in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals spent more than an hour grilling Trump’s lawyer and the appellate chief for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case and wants it to remain in state court.

At turns skeptical and receptive to both sides’ arguments on the weighty and seldom-tested legal issues underlying the president’s request, the judges said they would take the matter under advisement and issue a ruling at a later date.

But there was at least one thing all parties agreed on: It is a highly unusual case.

Trump lawyer Jeffrey Wall called the president “a class of one” and Judge Susan L. Carney noted that it was “anomalous” for a defendant to seek to transfer a case to federal court after it has been decided in state court.

Carney was nominated to the 2nd Circuit by Democratic President Obama. The other judges who heard arguments, Raymond J. Lohier Jr. and Myrna Pérez, were nominated by Obama and Democratic President Biden, respectively.

The Republican president is asking the federal appeals court to intervene after a lower-court judge twice rejected the move. As part of the request, Trump wants the court to seize control of the criminal case and then ultimately decide his appeal of the verdict, which is now pending in a state appellate court.

Trump’s Justice Department — now partly run by his former criminal defense lawyers — backs his bid to move the case to federal court. If he loses, he could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Everything about this cries out for federal court,” Wall argued.

Wall, a former acting U.S. solicitor general, argued that Trump’s historic prosecution violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, which was decided last July, about a month after the hush money verdict. The ruling reined in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricted prosecutors from pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Trump’s lawyers argue that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, and that they erred by showing jurors evidence that should not have been allowed under the ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how Trump reacted to news coverage of the hush money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.

“The district attorney holds the keys in his hand,” Wall argued. “He doesn’t have to introduce this evidence.”

Steven Wu, the appellate chief for the district attorney’s office, countered that Trump was too late in seeking to move the case to federal court. Normally, such a request must be made within 30 days of an arraignment, but a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., recently ruled that exceptions can be made if “good cause” is shown. Trump hasn’t done that, Wu argued.

While “this defendant is an unusual defendant,” Wu said, there is nothing unusual about a defendant raising subsequent court decisions, such as the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling for Trump, when they appeal their convictions. That appeal, he argued, should stay in state court.

Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of his four criminal cases to go to trial.

Trump’s lawyers first sought to move the case to federal court following his March 2023 indictment, arguing that federal officers including former presidents have the right to be tried in federal court for charges arising from “conduct performed while in office.” Part of the criminal case involved checks he wrote while he was president.

They tried again after his conviction, about two months after the Supreme Court issued its immunity ruling.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who was nominated by Democratic President Clinton, denied both requests, ruling in part that Trump’s conviction involved his personal life, not his work as president.

Wu argued Wednesday that Trump and his lawyers should’ve acted more immediately after the Supreme Court ruled, and that by waiting they waived their right to seek a transfer. Wall responded that they delayed seeking to move the case to federal court because they were trying to resolve the matter by raising the immunity argument with the trial judge, Juan Merchan.

Merchan ultimately rejected Trump’s request to throw out the conviction on immunity grounds and sentenced him on Jan. 10 to an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction intact but sparing him any punishment.

Sisak writes for the Associated Press.

May 31 (UPI) — An three-judge federal appeals panel has kept in place a lower court’s decision to pause the Trump administration’s plans to downsize the federal workforce through layoffs.

Late Friday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision denied an emergency motion by the federal government to stay U.S. District Judge Susan Illston‘s order on May 9 that halted terminations at 21 agencies.

The layoffs are called reductions in force, or RIFs.

In a 45-page ruling, the appeals court in California wrote the challengers likely will win the case on the merits.

The appeal panel said the Trump executive order on Feb. 13 “far exceeds the President’s supervisory powers under the Constitution.”

The Trump administration has also asked the Supreme Court to decide and has not acted.

“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields told CNN in a statement. “The President has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch – singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the President’s agenda.”

Ruling for the plaintiffs were Senior Circuit Judge William Fletcher, an appointee of President Bill Clinton and Lucy Koh, selected by President Joe. Consuelo Maria Callahan, an appointee of President George W. Bush, wrote in her dissent that “the President has the right to direct agencies, and OMB and OPM to guide them, to exercise their statutory authority to lawfully conduct RIFs.”

Fletcher wrote: “The kind of reorganization contemplated by the Order has long been subject to Congressional approval.”

Illston, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton and serves in San Francisco, had backed the lawsuit by labor unions and cities filed on April 28, including San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Harris County in Houston. She questioned whether Trump’s administration was acting lawfully in reducing the federal workforce and felt Congress should have a role.

“The President has the authority to seek changes to executive branch agencies, but he must do so in lawful ways and, in the case of large-scale reorganizations, with the cooperation of the legislative branch,” Illston wrote after hearing arguments from both sides.

“Many presidents have sought this cooperation before; many iterations of Congress have provided it. Nothing prevents the President from requesting this cooperation — as he did in his prior term of office. Indeed, the Court holds the President likely must request Congressional cooperation to order the changes he seeks, and thus issues a temporary restraining order to pause large-scale reductions in force in the meantime.”

The coalition of organizations suing told CNN said after the appeals decision: “We are gratified by the court’s decision today to allow the pause of these harmful actions to endure while our case proceeds.”

After Trump’s executive order, the Department of Government Efficiency submitted a Workforce Optimization Initiative and the Office of Personnel Management also issued a memo.

During Trump’s first 100 days in office, at least 121,000 workers have been laid off or targeted for layoffs, according to a CNN analysis. There are more than 3 million workers among civilian and military personnel.

Some of them have taken buyouts, “including those motivated to do so by the threat of upcoming RIFs,” according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

That includes 10,000 at the Department of Health and Human Services through RIF as part of a plan to cut 20,000 employees. That includes 20% of the workforce of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agencies, run by Cabinet-level personnel, sued were Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State and Treasury, Transportation, Veterans Affairs. The Education Department, which Trump wants to dismantle, was not listed, but 50% of the workforce has been let go.

Six additional agencies with statutory basis elsewhere in the United States Code were named: AmeriCorps, General Services Administration, National Labor Relations Board, National Science Foundation, Small Business Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.

Elon Musk, who officially left Friday as special White House adviser, was named in the suit.

By Tina Teng

Published on
30/05/2025 – 8:03 GMT+2

ADVERTISEMENT

A Federal appeals court temporarily blocked a ruling from the Court of International Trade that barred most of the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs on global trading partners. The legal development reignited uncertainty, sparking renewed selloffs in US stock markets and dragged the US dollar sharply lower from its intraday high.

The decision provides the White House with additional time to defend the legality of the president’s efforts to reshape global trade relations. Federal officials signalled that the same level of import levies could be reintroduced under alternative legal authorities, although enacting tariffs via other sections of the Trade Act could take several months.

“I can assure the American people that the Trump tariff agenda is alive, well, healthy and will be implemented to protect you, to save your jobs and your factories, and to stop shipping foreign wealth — our wealth — into foreign hands,” Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, said on Thursday.

Trump had invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose the so-called reciprocal tariffs announced in early April. However, on Wednesday, the trade court ruled that the president does not have the authority to impose such broad levies under the IEEPA.

“America cannot function if President Trump — or any other president, for that matter — has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “Ultimately, the Supreme Court must put an end to this for the sake of our Constitution and our country.”

Wall Street pares early gains

The US stock markets initially jumped on the original court ruling, alongside positive quarterly earnings results from Nvidia. However, major indices gave up early gains despite a higher close on Thursday. During Friday’s Asian session, US stock futures continued to fall as risk-off sentiment prevailed.

As of 4 am CEST, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were down 0.08%, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures both declined 0.26%.

European markets are also expected to open lower, according to futures pricing. The Euro Stoxx 50 was down 0.19%, and Germany’s DAX slipped 0.15%. German equities extended losses for a second consecutive day on Thursday, following a record high on Tuesday. Investors will be closely watching the progress of US-EU trade talks, though the legal battle surrounding the Trump administration’s tariffs is adding complexity to the outlook.

Asian equity markets also traded mostly lower on Friday. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 1.4%, Japan’s Nikkei 225 lost 1.39%, and South Korea’s Kospi dropped 0.61%. Australia’s ASX 200 was flat as of 3:10 am CEST.

The US dollar tumbles as haven assets rise

The latest court developments have once again dented investor confidence in US assets, particularly the dollar. Yields on US government bonds initially jumped to 4.5% but later pulled back to 4.42% as Treasury prices came under renewed pressure.

Meanwhile, haven assets have rallied. Gold jumped, and the euro, the Swiss franc, and the Japanese yen all strengthened significantly. The euro rebounded sharply from an intraday low against the dollar on Thursday after the tariff ruling was paused. The EUR/USD pair fell as low as 1.1210 before surging to 1.1353 as of 3:11 am CEST on Friday. Gold futures also swung higher, climbing to $3,321 per ounce from an intraday low of $3,269 on Thursday.

A federal appeals court has temporarily reinstated (PDF) US President Donald Trump’s tariffs a day after a trade court ruled that it exceeded the authorities granted to the president.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington temporarily blocked the lower court’s decision on Thursday, but provided no reasoning for the decision, only giving the plaintiffs until June 5th to respond.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted an emergency motion from the Trump administration arguing that a halt is “critical for the country’s national security”.

The White House has applauded the move.

“You can assume, even if we lose tariff cases, we will find another way,” trade adviser Peter Navarro said.

Wednesday’s surprise ruling by the US Court of International Trade had threatened to halt or delay Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs on most US trading partners, as well as import levies on goods from Canada, Mexico and China related to his accusation that the three countries were facilitating the flow of fentanyl into the US.

The International Court of Trade said tariffs issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which is typically used to address issues of national emergencies rather than addressing the national debt, were considered overreach.

Experts said the IEEPA, which was passed in 1977, is narrow in scope and targets specific countries, US-designated “terrorist organisations”, or gang activity pegged to specific instances. The US, for example, used the law to seize property belonging to the government of Iran during the hostage crisis in 1979 and the property of drug traffickers in Colombia in 1995.

“The 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act doesn’t say anything at all about tariffs,” Bruce Fain, a former US associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, told Al Jazeera.

Fein added that there is a statute, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows tariffs in the event of a national emergency. However, he said, it requires a study by the commerce secretary and can only be imposed on a product-by-product basis.

‘Product-by-product’

Despite the appeal court’s reprieve, Wednesday’s decision has been viewed as a blow to the administration’s economic agenda that has thus far led to declining consumer confidence and the US losing its top credit rating.

Experts believe that, ultimately, the tariffs will not last.

Posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday, lawyer Peter Harrell, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote that, if the trade court’s decision “is upheld, importers should eventually be able to get a refund of [IEEPA] tariffs paid to date. But the government will probably seek to avoid paying refunds until appeals are exhausted.″

“The power to decide the level of tariffs resides with Congress. The IEEPA doesn’t even mention raising tariffs. And it was actually passed in order to narrow the president’s authority. Now the president is using it to rewrite the tariff schedule for the whole world,” Greg Schaffer, professor of international law at Georgetown Law School, told Al Jazeera.

The US trade court did not weigh in on tariffs put in place by other laws, such as the Trade Expansion Act – the law used to justify tariffs on steel, aluminium, and automobiles.

There are additional targets for similar narrow tariffs, such as pharmaceuticals from China. In April, the White House announced that the US Department of Commerce launched an investigation to see if the US reliance on China for active ingredients in key medications posed a national security threat, thus warranting tariffs.

“This is not an issue of whether the president can impose tariffs,” said Fein, the former associate deputy attorney general. “He can under the 1962 act after there’s a study and after showing that it’s not arbitrary and capricious and that it’s a product-by-product, not a country-by-country approach.”

“If he doesn’t like that, he can ask Congress to amend the statute.”

After losing last month in Orange County Superior Court, the state of California is asking a state appellate court to overturn a Huntington Beach measure that could require voters to present photo identification to cast ballots in local elections.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, the state’s top elections official, have been tangling with Huntington Beach in court for more than a year over Measure A, which amends the city charter to say that local officials “may” require photo ID for municipal elections starting in 2026.

In April, Orange County Superior Court Judge Nico Dourbetas said the state had not shown that “a voter identification requirement compromises the integrity of a municipal election.” Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns called the ruling a “huge victory.”

Bonta appealed Wednesday to the 4th Appellate District, where the state hopes for a more favorable hearing. In February, a three-judge panel from the 4th District said that Huntington Beach’s assertion of a “constitutional right to regulate its own municipal elections free from state interference” was “problematic,” but kicked the case back down to Orange County Superior Court.

More than 53% of Huntington Beach voters supported the charter amendment in the March 2024 election.

The amendment also requires that Huntington Beach provide 20 in-person polling places and to monitor ballot drop boxes. The city has not shared plans on how the law could be implemented in next year’s elections.

A representative for Huntington Beach didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday. The city’s lawyers have argued that the city charter gives local officials autonomy to oversee municipal issues, including local elections.

Bonta and Weber contend that while California’s 121 “charter cities” can govern their own municipal affairs, local laws can’t conflict with state laws on issues of “statewide concern,” including the integrity of California elections and the constitutional right to vote.

The voter ID law is one of several fronts in the ongoing battle that conservative officials in Huntington Beach have waged against California since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The city has used similar arguments about its charter city status in fights over state housing laws, education policies for transgender students and “sanctuary state” immigration laws.

The issue of voter ID has become a flashpoint with conservative politicians, including President Trump, who in January demanded that California enact a voter ID law in order to receive aid for the devastating Los Angeles area wildfires.

California voters are required to verify their identities when they register to vote, and the state imposes criminal penalties for fraudulent registration. California does not require photo identification at the polls but does require that voters provide their names and addresses.

The photo ID measure may also be invalidated by Senate Bill 1174, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed last fall, which bars local election officials from requiring photo identification in elections.

WASHINGTON — An appeals court has cleared the way for President Trump’s executive order aimed at ending collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal employees while a lawsuit plays out.

The Friday ruling came after the Trump administration asked for an emergency pause on a judge’s order blocking enforcement at roughly three dozen agencies and departments.

A split three-judge panel in the nation’s capital sided with government lawyers in a lawsuit filed by unions representing federal employees. The majority ruled on technical grounds, finding that the unions don’t have the legal right to sue because the Trump administration has said it won’t end any collective bargaining agreements while the case is being litigated.

Judge Karen Henderson, appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush, and Justin Walker, appointed by Trump, sided with the government, while Judge Michelle Childs, appointed by Democratic President Biden, dissented.

The government says Trump needs the executive order so his administration can cut the federal workforce to ensure strong national security. The law requiring collective bargaining creates exemptions for work related to national security, as in agencies like the FBI.

Union leaders argue the order is designed to facilitate mass firings and exact “political vengeance” against federal unions opposed to Trump’s efforts to dramatically downsize the federal government.

His order seeks to expand that exemption to exclude more workers than any other president has before. That’s according to the National Treasury Employees Union, which is suing to block the order.

The administration has filed in a Kentucky court to terminate the collective bargaining agreement for the Internal Revenue Service, where many workers are represented by the National Treasury Employees Union. They say their IRS members aren’t doing national security work.

Other union employees affected by the order include the Health and Human Services Department, the Energy Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Communications Commission.

Whitehurst writes for the Associated Press.