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

Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Madam President, I fully support the resolution of Senator Kaine, and I want to make three points.

No. 1, should Congress continue to abdicate its constitutional responsibility, ceding it to the Executive?

No. 2, I want to talk about the total fantasy--fantasy world--that the Trump economic agenda is grounded in, if you can use the word ``grounded.''

And then, third, I want to talk about how these tariffs will be a dagger in the heart of the Vermont economy.

First of all, the question for this institution is, Will we, as the U.S. Senate, accept the responsibility that each and every one of us as Senators has to stand up for the independent authority and responsibility of this institution?

As we know, our Constitution was based on the proposition of real suspicion of the accumulation of power in any one entity. What was told to us in the Federalist Papers is what we know: If you have the concentration of power in any institution, that concentration of power leads inevitably to the abuse of power.

The design of our Constitution was to have equal and independent branches. And what I am seeing is a lawless rampage on the part of the Executive being accommodated by an appeasing Congress, not standing up for its authority in many different areas, and then also an attack on the judiciary, as though the judges who disagree with an Executive position should be impeached. But our authority over the budget is being abdicated, as we saw in the CR.

But another area of authority for the Congress is the tariff authority.

A couple of decades ago, this Congress gave and delegated some authority to the President in a national emergency to impose tariffs. That authority was given with the expectation--and rightly so, in a mutually respectful civil society--that a President would use it for the intended purpose and with restrain, whether it was Republican or Democrat, and that national security had the connotation and implication of a military threat to our country, where there needed to be immediate Executive action to protect the citizens of this country.

What President Trump has done is run roughshod over that, showing no restraint in using that delegation of authority, not for a national emergency but for whatever his latest policy ideas are and whatever leverage he wants to extract.

We cannot allow that to happen and maintain the separation of powers. It is absolutely so fundamental to the long-term well-being of our country.

So Senator Kaine is absolutely right. This is not a partisan question. It is an institutional question. Do we see our responsibility for maintaining that system of checks and balances? I do. That is the heart of this matter, and it is as important as even the outcome of what this tariff policy may be.

Second, where does this tariff policy come from? It comes from the President who is claiming that it will be a new golden age if we impose these tariffs.

By the way, these are astonishing tariffs: South Korea, 25 percent; Vietnam, 46 percent; Taiwan, 32 percent; Switzerland, 31 percent; Malaysia, 24 percent; Cambodia, 49 percent. Do we realistically think there will be no retaliation against America for these tariffs? We know there will be.

Yet what the President seems to think--and this literally is a fantasy--is that the golden age of America was when we had the tariff policy that economic historians say caused the Depression, but he says, if we had had the tariff policy, then we wouldn't have had the Depression. There is literally no support for this.

So the President has come up with this fiction, and what he is good at is sales. He says it over and over again. He cloaks it in an appealing objective: We want to have jobs back in America. And that is certainly something all of us share. But this fantasy he has--and it is a fantasy--that high tariffs are going to ``make us rich'' and be paid for by other countries instead of our consumers--just ask anybody who goes to Target or Walmart how that is going to work out for them. Ask anybody who is going to want to build a house or buy a house, where the prices are going to go up probably $25,000 in Vermont for a house.

The third thing I want to talk about is very concretely in Vermont. This is devastating for us in Vermont. Our farmers get most of their fertilizer from Canada--a 25-percent increase. Our farmers are on the margin. They are operating on such a thin margin that a 25-percent increase raises the existential question of whether they stay in business.

Our maple sugar producers get their equipment largely from Canada--a 25-percent increase in the expense of buying an evaporator.

Vermont consumers and businesses--we in Vermont are along the northern border. I see my colleague from New Hampshire. It is the same for you. We get so much of our home heating fuel, so much of our gasoline to power our cars, and so much of our electricity from Canada, that at the end of that month, when you are juggling your checkbook and trying to make it balance, you are going to have a higher electric bill, and you are going to have a higher home heating bill. And every time you fill up, you are going to pay between 25 cents and 40 cents more a gallon because in northern Vermont, that is where our gasoline comes from.

How is that going to serve anybody's interest? How is that going to help the people who are working hard every day to try to make ends meet? It is going to be devastating for them.

And in addition to all that uncertainty, we have a responsibility to make, through policy, the lives of our folks in business, the lives of our farmers, the lives of our moms and dads easier, not harder. In this uncertainty that is the hallmark of the Trump approach and these higher costs that are absolutely legislated as a result of his policy or by Executive order, that is going to make life harder for all of the people that I represent in Vermont.

Instead of just using my words, I want to use the words of a lot of Vermonters. When we got word of these tariffs going into effect, we had a couple of roundtables up in northern Vermont, in St. Albans and in Newport. Obviously, I wanted to hear from voters. Here is how they say it.

And, by the way, this is not a partisan deal. This is somebody who is trying to run a business, somebody who is trying to pay their bills and support their family. It is a construction company, a vegetable farmer.

Stoni Tomson:

It feels like death by a thousand cuts.

Vermont Foodbank, Jason Maring:

We get some of our vegetables from the Quebec side of the border. If the 25-percent tariff was applied in full, it would be about a $130,000-$150,000 unbudgeted hit to our food procurement efforts.

Catherine de Ronde of Agri-Mark:

The ripple-effects that this could have on energy markets, and of course manufacturing, is very heavy.

Matt Cook from PC Construction:

I'm just concerned in general that it's going to further stagnate the ability for some of these much-needed construction projects to move forward.

Denis Bourbeau of Bourbeau Custom Homes. They build about three or four homes a year--a good business in Northern Vermont:

I can foresee the making homes unaffordable--which they already are.

Another:

We would be strongly affected by the tariffs in terms of the equipment costs for U.S. producers. . . . I'm very concerned about the possible effects of this.

This is just another vivid example of that. Some of the hardest working people we have in Vermont are our loggers. They harvest logs and ship them up to Canada. And they will be paying a tariff when that log goes up. When it is milled and returned as lumber that can be used in home building, there will be a 25-percent tariff on that as that lumber returns. Who is going to pay for that--the home builder or the home buyer?

That is what is going to happen. How in the world is this going to lead to the so-called golden age? The golden age is as much a fantasy as is the fantasy that tariffs were the visionary economic policy that will bring us to the promised land.

These tariffs, No. 1, are the authority of Congress, if we exercise our authority. They are not the authority of the Executive, and Congress should stand up for itself and assert its authority and protect the constitutional promise of the separation of powers because we know that the concentration of power leads to the abuse of power. And, by the way, that is exactly what is happening right now.

Secondly, let's not be deluded by a fantasy economic theory that is at the core of this. It just makes no sense. It has no credibility. It has no intellectual foundation. Who knows how President Trump came to believe in this so much that he asserts it?

But, third, if we look at what is the impact on the people we represent--the people who build homes, the people who farm our fields, the people who tap maple syrup, the people who run health clinics, the people who run food banks--and we ask them: Hey, how is this going to affect you? Will it help? Will it hurt? And when every single one of those people we represent, who are doing the hard work, day in and day out, say: Peter, this is a disaster--and we are going to vote for it? No way.

Thank you, Senator Kaine.

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