When the Supreme Court struck down the president’s tariffs levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), it did nothing to change the administration’s position on the desirability of those tariffs. Most observers expected new tariffs to be levied using executive authorities that are legally unquestioned.

Sure enough, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) announced investigations into “Structural Excess Capacity and Production in Manufacturing Sectors” leading to the likely use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. (By the way, as time passes every trade law passed in the 1970s increasingly looks like as bad an idea as 1970s fashion and music.) USTR will investigate China, the European Union, Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Mexico, Japan, and India.

Section 301 is supposed to permit tariffs on countries with unfair trade practices that discriminate against the United States–and that is doubtless what USTR will conclude is the case. Normally, USTR would investigate each country individually, with the investigation including hearings and studies of the trade practices. In this instance, USTR appears to be buying in bulk with a single study covering all 16 entities and one hearing (on May 5) regarding their practices. And the entities are essentially the same countries that came to a trade agreement to relieve the IEEPA tariffs; the administration’s strategy appears to be to use the Section 301 process as pressure to keep those countries from walking away from those handshake agreements.

As explained by AAF’s Jacob Jensen, the Section 301 process could take as little as 135 days, which would mean that new tariffs could come into effect essentially as the temporary 10-percent tariffs under Section 122 expire. Of course, the process can also drag on for over a year (470 days). And it is far from clear what the scale of the 301 tariffs will be.

So, stay tuned for details, but new tariffs will be coming soon.