House Says No to Tariff Man
The House has delivered a serious rebuke to both Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson by voting against the blockade of floor resolutions challenging Trump’s “emergency” tariffs. Despite Johnson’s procedural delays and arm-twisting, three Republicans joined Democrats in voting to reject his latest ploy: Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.
Johnson kept the vote open for about an hour as leadership tried to flip votes. Nobody flipped. Greg Murphy of North Carolina didn’t vote.
This means that several resolutions disapproving particular tariffs will start coming to the House floor, beginning today. The first will be a vote to disapprove of Trump’s tariffs on Canada. The justification for these tariffs was especially nonsensical: Canada’s supposed export of fentanyl into the U.S., which is all but nonexistent.
When they come to the House floor, these resolutions may pick up more Republican support, since most House Republicans are free-traders. The Senate last year passed similar resolutions against Trump’s tariffs on several nations, with some Republicans joining Democrats.
In the case of Canada, the Senate voted twice to reject the tariffs, in April and again in October. Four Republican senators voted with the Democrats each time: Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Technically, these are resolutions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), which gives a president the power to declare an economic emergency but allows Congress to decide when the emergency is over. Any member of Congress can propose a resolution effectively ending the emergency, and the resolution is privileged, which means that the majority can’t stop it from coming to a vote. Johnson used bizarre procedural tactics to hold this off, but that’s now come to an end.
Unfortunately, the president is able to veto Congress’s action, which Trump will undoubtedly do. So the tariffs will continue, for now.
On Tap This story first appeared in the On Tap newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.
But the issue of whether Trump’s tariffs truly qualify as justified by an economic emergency is also pending before the Supreme Court. Every time Trump jacks up a tariff in a fit of petulance, he undermines his own case.
The House vote is one more crack in the dam of solid Republican support for Trump and Johnson. The process will keep anti-tariff votes in the headlines for several days and embarrass Trump, whose team lobbied House Republicans hard to maintain the blockade.
Trump’s tariffs are monumentally unpopular in the country, especially among businesses that absorb the cost. Recent research by Germany’s respected Kiel Institute found that 96 percent of the cost of Trump’s tariffs is borne by U.S. businesses and consumers and only 4 percent by exporters. The institute reached these findings by using shipment-level data covering over 25 million transactions valued at nearly $4 trillion.
Polls show that Americans oppose Trump’s tariffs by widening margins, most recently by about 2-to-1. Even among Republicans, slightly less than half support Trump’s tariffs.
The House action provided an opportunity for Democrats to keep banging away at the issue, at a time when Republicans in Congress find themselves on the wrong side of another key issue where public opinion is with Democrats—conditioning funding of the Department of Homeland Security on major constraints on ICE.
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