A small contingent of Senate Republicans again joined with Senate Democrats to reject President Donald Trump’s tariffs — this time on Canadian goods.
The Senate advanced a resolution from Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., on a bipartisan basis to terminate the emergency powers Trump used to declare retaliatory tariffs against Canada earlier this year.
Roughly the same core group of Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined Senate Democrats to reject the duties. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., opted to vote against this latest attempt to reject Trump’s tariffs.
‘The vice president came up yesterday to try to corral Republicans at their lunch,’ Kaine said before the lunch. ‘That shows the White House is worried about defectors on this.’
Indeed, their votes against Trump’s tariffs on Canada came after Vice President JD Vance warned Republicans that it would be a ‘huge mistake’ to break with the White House on the president’s tariff strategy, and he argued that using duties on countries across the globe offered leverage to generate better trade deals in return.
Paul, one of the co-sponsors of Kaine’s resolution, has consistently rejected Trump’s usage of tariffs and argued that it was a tax on consumers in the U.S. rather than on foreign countries.
He noted that the message it would send to the White House, despite pressure from Vance to support Trump’s duties, was ‘that a rule by emergency is not what the Constitution intended, that taxes are supposed to originate in the House of Representatives.’
The resolution was in response to Trump’s usage of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in July to impose tariffs on Canadian goods. The tariffs on the country vary, with Trump initially placing 35% duties on the country earlier this year, along with a blanket 50% tariff on steel from other countries.
However, he recently cranked up the tariffs on Canada by 10% following an ad that ran last week that featured former President Ronald Reagan, which used audio from the former president’s 1987 ‘Radio Address to the Nation on Free and Fair Trade.’
Trump railed against the ad, which was run by the government of Ontario, Canada, and declared, ‘ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,’ in a post on Truth Social.
The latest tariff vote is the second in a trio of resolutions from Kaine and several Senate Democrats. Despite the resolution terminating Trump’s emergency powers on tariffs in Brazil and Canada both advancing in the Senate, they will likely stall in the House.
McConnell staked his position against the tariffs in a statement, where he argued that retaliatory tariffs have negatively affected Kentucky farmers and distillers.
‘Tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive. The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule. And no cross-eyed reading of Reagan will reveal otherwise,’ he said. ‘This week, I will vote in favor of resolutions to end emergency tariff authorities.’