Senate Votes to End Trump’s Global Tariffs

Four Republican senators voted with Democrats on Thursday to approve a bipartisan resolution to repeal President Trump’s global tariffs, including steeper rates on long-time allies such as the European Union, Japan and South Korea.

Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), the GOP sponsor of the resolution, and Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) voted for it.

The same proposal failed in the Senate in late April on a 50-49 vote after Vice President Vance cast the tiebreaking vote to defeat it.

Critically, McConnell and Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), who voted Thursday for the resolution, missed the vote in the spring.

The one-page Senate joint resolution simply declares that the national emergency declaration that Trump invoked on April 2, which the president dubbed “Liberation Day,” to authorize sweeping reciprocal tariffs on countries cross the globe would be “terminated” on the date of its enactment.

Passage of the measure is a symbolic victory for critics of Trump’s trade policies, but it will have little practical effect as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is unlikely to bring it up for a vote in the House and Trump is certain to veto anything that curtails his power.

Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the lead Democratic sponsor of the resolution, said Trump’s tariffs have increased costs for ordinary Americans.

“American families are being squeezed by prices going up and up and up. More than three-quarters of families say their monthly expenses have increased by more than $100 a month,” he said on the floor.

McConnell in a statement released earlier this week warned that “tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive.”

“The economic harms of trade warns are not the exception to history, but the rule. And no cross-eyed reading of Reagan will reveal otherwise,” he added, referring to Trump’s pique over a television ad funded by the Canadian state of Ontario that used the words of President Reagan to criticize the president’s tariff policies, and ad that Trump claimed mischaracterized Reagan’s words.

The Senate voted earlier this week to terminate Trump’s steep tariffs on Canada and Brazil.

Neither of those bills, however, are expected to get a vote in the House.

Paul, Collins, Murkowski and McConnell voted Wednesday to end the 35 percent tariff against Canada and the same four Republicans and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) voted Tuesday to end the 50 percent tariff on Brazil.