Tariffs and Allies of the United States

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, at the end of the first week of President Trump's Presidency, he announced with great fanfare that he was imposing 25 percent tariffs on our neighbors, Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The Wall Street Journal, hardly a Democratic newspaper, described this effort as the dumbest trade war ever.

It was dumb because, number one, it violated the trade agreement that President Trump himself signed into law in 2020, the United States- Mexico-Canada Agreement. Again, tariffs like that are completely violative of that agreement.

Number two, Canada and Mexico made it crystal clear that they would retaliate with tariffs of their own aimed at U.S. businesses and sectors of all sorts.

It is mostly dumb because it is going to raise prices for Americans, which I think most of us in this Chamber who were on the ballot last November can still remember that that was the number one issue that Americans had.

It is going to raise prices not just because I am saying it. The American Farm Bureau, which represents a cross-section of American food producers all across the country, warned the minute that proposal came out that it was going to raise the cost of fertilizer input costs that was going to end up in the grocery stores in terms of higher prices.

American Home Builders, hardly a Democratic group, warned that those tariffs were going to raise the costs of building materials, whether it was wood or metal materials. That is going to translate into higher prices for new homes, the last thing we need in the middle of a housing crisis.

Predictably, February 1, the first day the markets were open, the markets tanked in response to this proposal. Within hours, the President engaged in a face-saving measure to delay those tariffs for 30 days. They are still out there and pending. We will see what happens.

Yesterday, right before the Super Bowl, the President came out with another proposal of a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum indiscriminately across the globe to any and all countries who do business with the United States of America.

I want to talk about one Nation in particular, Australia. I co-chair the Friends of Australia Caucus. Today, the U.S. economy has a trade surplus with Australia. We export more into Australia than they export back to us. They have been a signatory with a free trade agreement with no tariffs going back to 2002.

Again, as Secretary of Defense Hegseth stated yesterday at the Pentagon, when he met with the Australia Deputy Prime Minister, our alliance between our two countries, going back to World War I, is probably the most deep and strong of any other Nation in the world.

At that meeting he was also there to receive word from the Australian Government that they are making the first payment on AUKUS, the Australia, U.K., and U.S. security agreement.

Australia is putting $500 million into the U.S. industrial base to help our shipbuilding sector build more submarines, which is part of the AUKUS deal. It is a total of $3 billion. Again, the first check was delivered on Friday by the Australian Government for $500 million.

Two days later, what do we see? We see a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum products coming from Australia into the U.S. at a time when we have a surplus with Australia.

Australia is a key strategic ally for our country. They are positioned in the Indo-Pacific at a place where, again, tensions are sky-high. We need their input and their help in terms of making sure that we are going to rebalance that security environment and protect the rule of law in the Indo-Pacific.

Instead, what we are seeing is a completely needless insult to the people of Australia by raising tariffs on Australian products coming into this country at the same time we are working with them and they are buying three nuclear submarines, cash on the barrelhead, full price, no gimme, no giveaway.

Again, by all the measurements that President Trump talks about trade issues and that we are being ripped off by other countries, in this case every one of those arguments fails. The Friends of Australia Caucus is a strong bipartisan caucus that actually understands the importance of Australia.

Again, we will do everything we can to make sure that this administration changes course and treats our friends and our allies with the respect that they deserve in terms of the contributions that they are making to their national security in a critical part of the world and our national security.

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