Terminating the National Emergency Declared to Impose Duties on Articles Imported From Canada

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here in support of Senator Kaine's effort to get this body to take a public view on President Trump's mad declaration that we have a border emergency with Canada happening right now.

I can tell you that if I go home to Rhode Island and ask people what the emergency is in their lives, I wouldn't get one person who said: Oh, we have got a real emergency with Canada. They are a huge threat. That whole Canada situation, boy, that is dangerous.

This is nutty stuff, and it is dangerous stuff economically. Just in Rhode Island, Canada is our largest international trading partner. Twenty-two percent of Rhode Island's exports are to Canada, and we import from Canada as well. And when the tariffs get reciprocated by our Canadian friends after this ridiculous behavior from President Trump, then that is going to affect all Rhode Islanders.

We buy a lot of energy, for instance, from Canada, and that is going to raise costs for Rhode Island families. It is a direct hit to people's pocketbooks. And as has been pointed out, this is just a shady way to hit Americans in the pocketbook, to raise revenue so that this phony-baloney budget resolution we are about to have to deal with can open up revenues that they can then use as a justification for lowering taxes for the billionaires and the big corporations who already pay way too little in taxes.

Some billionaires pay no income taxes at all. The corporate share of America's revenue has gone from about 30 percent of America's revenue down to single digits. That is just a huge sucking sound pulling out of America's revenue the revenue of the corporate entities, and it is not the mom-and-pop flower store. It is the huge multinational that goes and pretends that it is doing its business in Ireland or the Cayman Islands or someplace and hides profits.

This is a tax racket against the American people that is now being propped up and made worse by a tariff racket against the American people. And the excuse is one of the dumbest ones ever: that the emergency is fentanyl.

Well, Rhode Island was at the heart of the opioid epidemic. That is why I worked with Senator Portman to pass the CARA bill, the biggest addiction recovery response bill this body has ever passed. I take this issue deadly seriously--not the President. Not the President.

Mr. President, 0.2 percent of the fentanyl in America comes across the enormous Canadian border. If you did it like per mile of the American border, it would be immeasurably small. And over this fake excuse that there is a huge fentanyl problem, 0.2 percent, they are going to dump enormous new expenses on American families.

People have called this a sales tax, and it kind of is because what it does is it raises prices. It raises prices because the money that the Federal Government takes in has to be recovered, and it gets recovered from families, from people who are paying higher prices for imported goods or higher prices for the domestic freeloaders who are going to raise their prices to match the imported goods just the way the fossil fuel industry raised their prices to match the foreign prices of fuel after the Ukraine invasion and so gorged themselves that they made the biggest profits off the American people in the history of corporations.

It was the biggest gouge ever by the scoundrels of the fossil fuel industry, and now we are opening the door for this to happen across all industries.

American families are going to be hurt, and they are going to be hurt hard. And it just puts revenues on the books that the Republicans can then use to go and do what they really want to do here, which is to make sure that all their billionaire cronies, everybody who is surrounding Trump, all the pals in the Cabinet, and all the ones who write the big checks to the super-PACs and who fund Republican politicians don't have to pay taxes anymore.

It is ``Leona Helmsley Day'' here in the Senate. Taxes are just for the little people. This is a disgrace, and I hope there will be a few voices on the Republican side to recognize that considering the Canadian border to be an emergency is preposterous.

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