In Today’s News and Commentary, Trump’s tariffs live to see another day, the Louisiana Senate is considering a bill that targets payroll deduction of union dues for public sector employees, and the Colorado Supreme Court will consider whether an employee can be fired for acting in self-defense in the workplace.

Yesterday evening, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a temporary administrative stay of the U.S. Court of International Trade’s (“ITC”) unanimous Wednesday ruling against Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, permanently enjoining them on a nationwide basis. The three-judge ITC panel, which included appointees by Presidents Reagan, Obama, and Trump, heard two consolidated cases—V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. United States and Oregon v. Department of Homeland Security—and considered whether the President has unlimited tariff authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). The ITC held that whether one “views the President’s actions through the nondelegation doctrine, through the major questions doctrine, or simply with separation of powers in mind, any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.” The ITC then explained that a separate federal law, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 permits the president to impose across the board 15% tariffs for up to 150 days in response to trade deficits. If the courts ultimately block these tariffs, Section 122 may be used for the first time ever to implement new tariffs.

The Louisiana Senate will soon hold a vote on House Bill 293, which functionally ends payroll deduction without actually prohibiting it. HB293 is a downstream effect of Janus v. AFSCME, the 2018 landmark Supreme Court decision that held that the First Amendment guarantees the right of a worker to pay or not pay a union. HB293 targets payroll deduction of union dues for public sector employees under the guise of employee autonomy and paycheck protection in two ways. First, the bill gets rid of what proponents of the bill term “restrictive drop windows” and allows employees to immediately cease the withholding of union dues from their wages upon submitting a written or electronic request to their employer at any time. Second, authorization for dues deductions cannot exceed one year, requiring employees to annually reauthorize deduction through their employer. Additionally, if the amount changes at all, the employee must also reauthorize dues. Notably, HB293 does not apply to police officers or firefighters. This bill has the potential to irrevocably alter the labor landscape both within and beyond Louisiana’s borders by undermining Louisiana public sector unions’ financial stability and inspiring copycat legislation elsewhere. As the president of Seven Mountains AFL-CIO remarked on Bluesky, “[t]he goal here is simply to harass unions, make it hard for members to stay members, and to bleed money from labor.”

Lastly, the Colorado Supreme Court has accepted a certification request from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado in Moreno v. Circle K Stores, Inc. to determine whether self-defense in the workplace is a public policy exception to at-will employment. In October 2020, Ms. Mary Ann Moreno—who was seventy-two years old at the time and in her sixteenth year of working as a low wage hourly at-will clerk—was fired for violating Circle K’s “Confront & Chase Policy” because she made contact with a robber who had two knives and came behind the counter towards her after she refused to provide him cigarettes for free. Ms. Moreno filed a claim for wrongful discharged in violation of public policy based on self-defense in state court, but Circle K removed to federal court. There, the District Court refused Moreno’s request to certify “whether the right to self-defense when an employee perceives an attack from a customer is an exception to the at-will employment doctrine” and ultimately  sided with Circle K. The Tenth Circuit remanded the case with an order to more fully analyze the preliminary and potentially dispositive issues, particularly whether Circle K actually fired Ms. Moreno for using self-defense. The District Court concluded that there were genuine issues of material fact that precluded summary judgment, which led to the certification request of this novel question of important state public policy.