When the going gets tough, the tough … take a recess? As U.S. stock markets shudder and the global economy teeters on the brink of recession thanks to the Trump administration’s unprovoked tariff wars, America’s congressional representatives are preparing to skip town for two weeks.
Not that it would much matter if they suddenly decided to stay in Washington after Friday and, you know, do their jobs. Most House and Senate Republicans have made crystal clear that, wherever they physically happen to be, they are permanently AWOL when it comes to asserting their constitutionally mandated authority over trade.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is unambiguous: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” — and “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” Period.
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It’s true that Congress has willingly bestowed upon the presidency increased power over trade in modern times, for the same reason it has mostly abdicated its own authority over declaring war and other urgent issues: It’s the politically easy thing to do.
That doesn’t mean Congress can’t reassert such powers when a president is clearly abusing them. The fact that President Donald Trump’s tariff-mania is based primarily upon the plainly false declaration of a national emergency regarding trade is as abusive as it gets.
Some Republicans have stepped up. GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine all sided with Democrats this month in an effort to block tariffs Trump announced against Canada. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has co-sponsored a bill that would cause any new tariffs to expire if they aren’t approved by Congress within 60 days.
“For too long,” Grassley said in a statement last week, “Congress has delegated its clear authority to regulate interstate and foreign commerce to the executive branch.”
That kind of constitutional fidelity and clear-eyed courage is, unfortunately, in short supply in Grassley’s party today. Too many of his GOP colleagues are taking the easy path of slavishly declaring their support for whatever Trump does, even when it clearly hurts their own constituents.
“Auto workers right there in the St. Louis region are cheering Trump’s tariffs because we have been losing auto jobs to Mexico for years,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, recently told an interviewer. “... You’ve got a lot of people who are very happy” about the tariffs.
“What I hear from my farmers,” says U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, who represents southeast Missouri, “is that we’re willing to have the short-term pain for the long-term gain.”
The reality outside the MAGA bubble is a little different. American auto workers are already being laid off as a direct result of Trump’s 25% tariffs against all automobile imports, because many of the parts for those foreign-made cars are manufactured in the U.S. And polls show farmers are generally opposed to the agricultural tariffs because they know retaliatory tariffs from other nations will make their crops harder to sell overseas.
“Tariffs will drive up the cost of critical supplies, and retaliatory tariffs will make American-grown products more expensive globally,” American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall recently said in a statement. “The combination not only threatens farmers’ competitiveness in the short-term, but it may cause long-term damage by leading to losses in market share.”
And this part cannot be said too strenuously or too often: U.S. tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers. We pay them when we buy imported goods. The fact that the president of the United States remains apparently incapable of grasping that simple, undebatable fact is in itself deeply troubling.
At least the public gets it, according to poll after poll showing a majority of Americans oppose Trump’s tariff expansions.
Yet at this writing (midday Tuesday), the administration is preparing to formally invoke the next round of steep new tariffs against most U.S. trading partners, starting Wednesday.
The latest tariffs were calculated under a novel formula that has been widely dismissed by most economists as economic gobbledygook. The senseless results are higher tariffs against friends like Israel than enemies like Iran — and, perhaps not surprisingly from this president, a free pass for Russia.
We hesitate to offer too much more detail here about the latest round of tariffs because the situation could well be turned on its head by the time this editorial is in print. That unpredictability, driven entirely by Trump’s innate impetuousness, is almost as big a problem as the tariffs themselves — and all the more reason for Congress to step in and bring some order to this chaos before it does permanent damage to the economy.
Given the anger that constituents have expressed to the few Republican members of Congress who have been brave (or foolish) enough to hold town hall meetings lately, it’s a good bet most of them will remain hunkered down away from the public during their approaching two-week break.
That’s too bad, because those constituents deserve a simple answer to a simple question: Why isn’t Congress working to slow down a tariff train that both economic experts and the public at large believe is dangerously out of control?
