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Republican senators were forced late Wednesday to do something they’ve avoided: take a public stand on the trade war President Donald Trump is instigating.
The Senate passed a Democratic resolution taking aim at his earlier tariffs on Canada, just hours after Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden to announce sweeping plans to impose reciprocal tariffs on other countries.
The vote was 51-48, with four Republicans joining all Democrats voting in favor.
While the resolution had just enough Republican defectors to pass, it’s unlikely to force Trump to change his ways. Trump has promised he would veto it even if House Republican leaders were to permit a vote in their chamber.
Still, the measure is a rare rebuke for Trump’s policies by the Republican-controlled Senate, which has otherwise broadly supported, or at minimum declined to impede, his sweeping plans to slash government and remake the US economy.
Plenty of lawmakers express unease, but it’s cast in hopes that Trump’s higher tariffs won’t last long or action will be taken to mitigate the impact on key constituencies such as farmers. A vote for the resolution, which would end the national emergency Trump has used as authority to impose tariffs on Canada, serves as a public mark of dissent.
Trump is celebrating his new tariffs as “Liberation Day,” while vowing to make certain duties enacted in recent weeks permanent. Meanwhile, Senate Republican leader John Thune of South Dakota said he hopes the duties are temporary.
Thune told reporters on Monday that “there’s concerns about tariffs on Canada and what the ultimate objective is.” Canada is his state’s largest export market.
Thune, like many of his colleagues, said he is mindful of the potential harm retaliatory tariffs pose to home-state industries such as agriculture and expressed discomfort with any “across-the-board tariffs.”
Canada and Mexico already face 25% tariffs tied to drug trafficking and illegal migration; those will remain in place and the US’s two largest trading partners will not be subject to the new tariff regime as long as the separate tariffs are in effect. Exemptions on goods covered by the North American trade agreement Trump brokered in his first term will stay.
Trump urged Republicans in a social media post on Tuesday to vote against the measure, saying it would be “devastating” for the party.
In the end, the four Republican senators Trump had warned were wavering — Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — all voted in favor of the measure and in opposition to Trump’s Canadian tariffs. All other Republicans backed the president.
“The Senate Bill is just a ploy of the Dems to show and expose the weakness of certain Republicans, namely these four, in that it is not going anywhere because the House will never approve it and I, as your President, will never sign it,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post earlier in the week.
Seeking exceptions
Trump for now remains firmly in control of tariffs, the primary weapons of trade war, since Congress has largely ceded its constitutional authority over duties to the executive branch. And his political domination of lawmakers in his party exceeds that of any recent US president.
But the political fates of Trump and his congressional allies are closely connected, since the loss of either the House or Senate in midterm elections barely 19 months away would subject his administration to damaging congressional investigations, funding restrictions and other limitations.
Republican lawmakers’ concerns are already driving behind-the-scenes lobbying campaigns for tariff exemptions that would poke holes in the duties. Financial losses among politically powerful groups would strengthen calls for costly taxpayer bailouts such as the tens of billions in trade aid farmers received during Trump’s first-term tariff fight and ultimately raise pressure to settle trade conflicts by scaling back the president’s demands.
The White House has declared it will stand firm against tariff exemptions, which over time were granted to many favored industries in his first term. But Senate Agriculture Chairman John Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, said Thursday he is already having conversations with the administration about exempting fertilizer from any tariffs on Canada to spare US farmers the added cost.
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, has said she’s trying to persuade Trump advisers to soften the blow tariffs against Canada would have on key industries in her home state, including lobstering and paper mills, both of which have production chains that crisscross the border.
She told reporters Tuesday that the decision to impose duties on Canada “just makes no sense.”
Still, many Republican lawmakers embrace Trump’s tariff stances, either as a way to strong-arm concessions from trading partners or encourage foreign companies to open facilities in the US. In a Fox Business interview last week, Senator Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, credited Trump’s tariff threats for prompting new project announcements in his state, including Honda’s reported plan to build its next-generation Civic hybrid in Indiana.
But the political risk to Republican members of Congress is underscored by a sharp deterioration in consumer confidence amid fears tariffs will drive up prices. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment tumbled to a more-than-two-year low in March and long-term inflation expectations jumped to a 32-year high.
The prospect of impending tariffs also has roiled financial markets.
Even as Trump’s congressional allies brush aside the recent stock market drop, some voice worries that economic uncertainty could hurt the party’s policy agenda.
“I am concerned about it in planning to complement our deregulatory work, our tax work we have ahead of us, because that will produce the growth economy in the next few years,” Representative French Hill, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, said Thursday on Fox Business.
Several Senate Republicans have consistently condemned the president’s trade policy.
McConnell, Republicans’ longtime former Senate leader and a GOP establishment figure who arrived in Washington when Ronald Reagan was celebrating free markets, published an opinion article denouncing broad-based tariffs on Canada and Mexico as harmful to workers in his home state of Kentucky.
Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, another free-market Republican, highlights the toll retaliatory tariffs took on his home state during Trump’s first trade war, when the European Union hit Milwaukee-based Harley-Davidson Inc. with punitive duties. The EU already has signaled the iconic American motorcycle manufacturer is on its target list again.
Johnson put his view bluntly: “I’m concerned,” he said on Monday. “It’s a high risk move on his part.”
–With assistance from Steven T. Dennis.
(Updates with Senate vote totals in third paragraph, and details on vote from 12th paragraph.)
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