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National Review
National Review
25 Apr 2025
Dominic Pino


NextImg:The Corner: Congress Can Stop the Tariff Madness Next Week

They can do the right thing and vote for a one-sentence resolution ending the national emergency declaration being used to usurp Congress’s tariff powers.

Before “liberation day,” a group of senators including Rand Paul (R., Ky.) introduced a resolution to terminate the bogus national emergency undergirding U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods. It passed the Senate 51–48, with Paul, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Susan Collins (Maine), and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) as the Republicans voting in favor. The House didn’t take it up, not that it would have mattered anyway. Terminating a national emergency requires a joint resolution, which the president must sign, so a veto-proof majority would likely have been required to actually end the tariffs.

Next week, Congress will have another chance to reassert its constitutional authority over tariffs. Paul and Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) have introduced a joint resolution that’s one sentence long. All it does is terminate the April 2 national emergency declaration that is being used to usurp Congress’s tariff powers.

Since the last resolution passed the Senate, Trump’s tariff policies have gotten much crazier, with universal tariffs supposedly based on trade deficits but still applying to the roughly 100 countries with which the U.S. has trade surpluses. Then there are the added tariffs for countries with trade deficits — including against countries such as Israel that eliminated all their tariffs on U.S. goods — which are paused until early July.

Many members of Congress are uncomfortable and concerned about the impacts of tariffs in their districts and states. Trump’s economic-approval ratings have declined over the course of the month, and that decline is bleeding over into other issues such as immigration. The bond market continues to send troubling signals about investors’ confidence in the U.S., which is partly due to the massive uncertainty in the entire country’s trade rules.

Republicans in Congress can complain about all of this. They can continue to field calls from retirees in their districts about the value of their IRAs being depleted and from business owners in their districts about the jobs they’ll have to cut and prices they’ll have to raise because of tariffs. Republican lawmakers will then face the consequences when voters go to the polls next year, with Democrats now leading in the generic congressional ballot.

Or, they can vote for this resolution next week and end this sideshow. Republicans need to focus on cutting spending and extending the 2017 tax cuts, and all the political capital that is burned on this nonsensical tariff policy can’t be used for those vital tasks.

To get a veto-proof majority, assuming all Democrats vote in favor, 20 out of 53 Republicans in the Senate and 77 out of 218 Republicans in the House need to vote for the resolution. Not even a majority of Republicans need to do the right thing to get the right result.

Will they? I’m not holding my breath. But it’s still worth noting that they have the power and next week will have the opportunity to act on it.