Democrats on Wednesday vowed to fight President Donald Trump’s tariffs “tooth and nail” and criticized his policies as having started an “absurd, crazy, chaotic trade war.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer held a news conference just hours before Trump’s big tariff reveal, where he urged Republicans to join Senate Democrats on a measure to block tariffs on Canadian goods.
Four of them did — GOP Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell and co-sponsor Rand Paul — as it passed by a 51-48 vote. Republican Sen. Roger Marshall did not vote and all Senate Democrats voted for it.
The resolution needed only a simple majority of votes to pass the Senate and it now heads to the House. But there’s nothing to compel House Speaker Mike Johnson to take it up, so it’s unlikely to further progress. The Senate also fell far short of the number of votes that would ultimately be necessary to bust a Trump veto if the bill ever got to his desk.
“Speaker Johnson already declared [Democratic] Senator [Tim] Kaine’s resolution dead on arrival in the House of Representatives. It will never make it to President Trump’s desk,” Republican Whip Sen. John Barrasso said in a statement after the vote. “This meaningless messaging resolution will not stop Senate Republicans from making America’s communities safer.”
Still, the passage of the bill is a boon to efforts to challenge Trump’s tariffs just hours after he announced then.
The resolution would end the national emergency declaration against Canada, thereby curtailing Trump’s authority to unilaterally impose tariffs. His emergency declaration was based in concerns about the flow of fentanyl over the Canadian border to the United States.
Democrats have said that while the agree that fentanyl is an issue, the issue does not stem from Canada.
“Considering the Canadian border to be an emergency is preposterous,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said.
Before the vote, Schumer said of Senate Republicans, “They know [the tariffs are] a tax hike on the American people. They know that the stock market is in turmoil, risking people’s retirements. They know that consumer confidence is down and the odds of a recession — something people hate, it’s harder to find a job, keep a job, maintain your weekly budget if a recession occurs — and now our greatest financial prognosticators are saying the chances of recession because of these tariffs, this tariff tax, goes way up.
“So, we’re going to fight these tariffs tooth and nail. Trump’s done a lot of bad things. This is way up there,” Schumer said.
Trump, in an early morning post on his social media platform, pressured Republicans to oppose the measure — going so far as to call out some specific members of his party by name.
“Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change,” he wrote on his social media platform.
The president added the 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.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also preemptively slammed Trump’s tariffs, saying they will make goods more costly.
“This is not Liberation Day. It’s Recession Day in the United States of America,” Jeffries said. “That’s what the Trump tariffs are going to do.”
Top House Republicans, meanwhile, expressed confidence in Trump ahead of this Rose Garden unveiling. Though they admitted their may be some “short-term pain” as a result.
“I trust the president’s instincts,” Johnson said when asked by ABC News if he’s concerned. “We are fully supportive of his initiatives, and we’ll see how it all shakes out.”
“The president talked in the State of the Union that that may be some short-term pain, ultimately, long term we’re going to get more things made in America, and we’re going to get fair treatment of America by other countries,” said Majority Leader Steve Scalise.
