Katharine Tai, President Joe Biden’s nominee for U.S. trade representative, enjoys broad bipartisan support in Congress through her work as a USMCA negotiator when she was House Ways and Means Committee chief trade counsel, Nicole Bivens Collinson, Sandler Travis president-international trade and government relations, told a Sports & Fitness Industry Association webinar Feb. 23. Tai’s Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing is set for 10 a.m. Feb. 25, and she’s going to be asked a lot of questions about the Biden administration’s posture toward the Section 301 tariffs on China, Collinson said. If all goes as well as expected with her confirmation process, Tai could be sworn in as USTR as soon as March 8, she said.

The processing operations in China on frozen roasted eel from the U.S. or Europe are close enough to filleting to result in a substantial transformation, CBP said in a Dec. 16 ruling. Law firm Grunfeld Desiderio asked CBP on behalf of American Eel Depot for a further review of protest after multiple entries of the eels were entered as products of China and subject to Section 301 duties. The company argued that the eels should instead be of U.S. or European origin.

In a recent expansion on the cost of a rule on imports of computers, telecom equipment, robots, drones and other electronics, the Commerce Department estimated that the six nations named as foreign adversaries were responsible for more than half of U.S. imports of those goods. Commerce earlier estimated that the total cost of the regulation could be as high as $20 billion (see 2101150055), and that remains, but they broke it down into the cost to learn about the rule, the cost to develop a compliance plan, the cost for annual compliance, and the cost of compliance with investigations.

The country of origin for pipe clamps and bar clamps depends on where the clamp heads that hold things in place are made, CBP said in a Sept. 11, 2020, ruling. The recently released ruling was requested by a lawyer at Sonnenberg & Cunningham on behalf of Great Star Industrial USA. The pipe clamps are imported without a pipe, which is supplied by the user, while the bar clamps are imported already mounted on a steel bar.

Importers of steel and aluminum could be facing higher antidumping duty rates, after the Court of International Trade ruled Feb. 17 that Section 232 tariffs are a form of normal import duties that should be deducted from foreign exporters' U.S. prices in AD duty rate calculations. The trade court held that, unlike Section 201 safeguard duties and AD/CV duties, which are not deducted, the national security-based Section 232 tariffs have a different purpose unrelated to remediating injury from an import surge or underpriced imports.

Many expect trade policy under the Biden administration to be more worker-focused than consumer-focused, but many specifics remain undecided. “The jury is still out on what that pro-worker trade policy will look like in practice,” said Joshua Boswell, a lawyer at Crowell & Moring. Boswell spoke to a webinar audience Feb. 17 on the 2021 trade outlook and said such predictions don't tell you much about tariffs, free trade negotiations or trade remedies in and of themselves.

International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from Feb. 8-12 in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

The Court of International Trade on Feb. 16 ordered a cigarette rolling paper importer to pay a $239,946.40 penalty for negligent violations of Section 592 because of $5,296.37 in remaining unpaid excise taxes. Judge Gary Katzmann issued the default judgment against The Token Group after the importer failed to appear in court to dispute the charge that it hadn't paid the full $119,973.20 in excise taxes it originally failed to pay.

The U.S. Court of International Trade plans to “proceed first” on choosing a “representative sample” of test cases to manage the roughly 3,500 Section 301 complaints inundating the court, said an order signed Feb. 16 by the three-judge panel of Mark Barnett, Claire Kelly and Jennifer Choe-Groves. All the suits seek to get the List 3 and List 4A Chinese tariffs vacated and the duties refunded with interest. “The court expects that the number of sample cases identified will be small enough to permit the efficient disposition of this litigation while allowing the court to consider all claims raised by the various Plaintiffs,” the order said. “The court anticipates issuing a stay of all Section 301 cases assigned to the panel that are not selected to proceed as sample cases.”

Automotive window parts imported by WKW Erbsloeh North America are subject to antidumping and countervailing duties on aluminum extrusions from China (A-570-967/C-570-968), the Commerce Department said in a recent scope ruling. While rubber window seals and rolled aluminum window trim are not aluminum extrusions and aren’t covered by the orders, other window components containing extruded aluminum are covered because they are components of a finished car, rather than “finished merchandise” on their own, Commerce said.