Trump Tariffs

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today out of deep concern for the manufacturing workers and families of northern Ohio, from Toledo Jeep to our numerous parts suppliers and union shops across the Great Lakes in both the United States and Canada. The Trump administration's reckless and arbitrary tariff policy is putting their jobs and livelihoods at risk.

These billboards just started to go up in our region. Trump's tariffs are a tax. They are a tax on everything.

While yesterday President Trump claimed to pause all tariffs, he left in place a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all global trade entering the United States, even in places like our region where we have a very wonderful relationship with companies in Canada. We are an integrated economy. We don't need any tariffs, not at our end of the country.

Let me be clear. Tariffs are not a strategy. They are a tax on working Americans and the firms that employ them. If not wisely applied, jobs hang in the balance on both sides of our border between the United States and Canada.

A part in a car or truck, in a steel mill, all of this that happens in our area can cross over the border six times. Is it going to be a 10 percent tariff put on every time it crosses the border? This is crazy.

Tariffs threaten good-paying jobs. They raise prices at the checkout line. They disrupt deeply integrated supply chains, like ours, especially with Canada, Ohio's largest fair trade partner that keeps our auto industry strong and globally competitive.

We don't need any more problems. We have been fighting global competition now for half a century, and it is rough. Instead of a blunt Trump instrument, we need a targeted approach that brings real investment to American manufacturing and in the communities hollowed out by decades of bad and broken trade deals and outsourcing.

I call on this administration. We do share in common a deep worry about the trade deficit, but work with us. Work with Congress to craft smart, strategic reciprocity agreements with each country. Ensure that workers, like United Auto Workers, have a seat at the table, a voice, and real power to negotiate on all sides of all borders.

For too long, what has been happening is billionaire companies and corporate executives have been taking our production and outsourcing it to penny-wage nations. It is slave labor, really, where people make hardly anything, if $1 an hour, maybe $2 an hour, competing against a First World economy like ours.

As the proud daughter of union workers, I know that the road to rebuilding American manufacturing runs straight through our heartland, through the working class, the people who work hard, the spine of America's industrial economy in our Great Lakes region and the Midwest.

America's enemies around the world today are applauding the self- inflicted tariff chaos that has been exacted on our people. They are also plotting as they watch the U.S. stock market plummet, and then bounce back a little bit, and then go down again, endangering and impacting markets around the globe. Reckless and cavalier economic policy could lead us into a Trump recession.

A record of trillions of dollars in U.S. wealth was just lost this past week due to chaotic moves on tariffs arbitrarily imposed by the Trump administration. This week, the hole was being dug deeper as markets continued to free-fall. There was a partial rollback. Where will the roller coaster head next week? Nobody really knows.

None of the tariffs that the President has proposed and implemented have ever had a single vote in this Congress. This is unconstitutional, and it has caused a loss in the 401(k) retirement accounts of tens of millions of Americans. Those took a nosedive. They have been yo-yoing up and down. We are talking about $10 trillion of market losses these past few days. That is unprecedented.

Where is Speaker Johnson? Is he asleep at the wheel? Where is the Republican Committee on Ways and Means? Is it on vacation?

The Trump administration's dangerous overreach is totally damaging to our economy and unnerving to our trade allies around the globe. Crashing the U.S. and global economy is not in the short- or long-term interests of the American people.

President Trump thought his so-called liberation day was a huge success. If the goal was liberating Americans from their hard-earned money and making them pay more for everything, whether it is their car--thousands of dollars more are going to be placed on top of the purchase of a car--the price of energy they pay, the price of gas, and the price of food. Take your pick. Lumber and housing are outpriced for most people now.

Meanwhile, when asked about car prices going up, the President gave a rare, troubling response. He said: ``I couldn't care less.'' That is what he said about automotive prices.

President Trump, come to Ohio. Come to us. Visit us with Canada. Let us show you what we have done without your help for decades, trying to rebuild the industrial spine of America.

I will fight for the American auto industry without tanking our economy because, clearly, there are some people in charge who don't know what they are doing and are raising prices on every single citizen in this country.

Retirement plans should be sacred. What just happened on Wall Street made a whole lot of people nervous.

We got so many phone calls in our office. Not only are jobs at risk but retirement savings are put at risk. Investments are put at risk.

I spent too much of my time in this House and in this Chamber trying to repair the economic damage to our economy from trade deals like NAFTA, CAFTA, China PNTR. They said USMCA was going to fix everything.

Guess what? The trade deficit is getting worse every year. That means our jobs are being hollowed out to someplace else, and they need to be returned to this country. We need to negotiate that. It won't just happen because we want it to happen.

As a private businessman and billionaire, Donald Trump never lifted a finger to help us. He didn't stop the outsourcing of jobs during his first term. They got worse. Jobs were outsourced.

We had family farm after family farm collapse across this country through consolidation. He didn't do anything.

You need a partnership between the legislative branch and the executive branch working with our companies. This is complicated. It doesn't just happen.

As a result, we have these gigantic trade deficits. We haven't had a balanced trade account in this country in over half a century. There is a cost to that. It comes in jobs, wages, and the ability to pay your way forward in your own family. It is happening in manufacturing, agriculture, and energy, and there must be reforms in trade policy. We all agree on that. It is not a question of whether but how.

Huge trade deficits translate into growing U.S. debt. We hear a lot on the other side of the aisle about the debt. There would be a lot more economic strength if we hadn't outsourced so many jobs. With Canada, our largest fair trade partner, the books look pretty good.

The Great Lakes folks get along on both sides of the border, so why disrupt something that is working? That is absolutely insane.

Tariffs can be a tool to create jobs and wealth, as well as bring back jobs to our country, and we ought to head in that direction. Yet, the President's efforts seem to be adding more trade deficits, not balancing our trade accounts.

America can't import its way to jobs and wealth. It must export products. We must grow things, make things here, and export them. Thus, fair trade with nations that play by the fair trade rules must be our objective.

Let's start there. Let's work with our friends and then open up other markets and retool other markets where that isn't working in our interests. You can't just do it with a broad brush stroke.

Working with Canada is very different than working with China, believe me. At the same time, we must carefully ensure that we grow jobs here through our trade policies and prevent price gouging by adversaries that benefit from protection in the marketplace.

Here is what China does: It manufactures four times as much steel as the world consumes, and then it strategically dumps to wipe out production.

Come with me to Lorain, Ohio. It is deeply in my heart. I represented it for 10 years until they gerrymandered our State again and took it away. What happened to the workers in Lorain, Ohio, should happen to no worker in this country. They deserve better for the hard work that they do.

Mr. Speaker, let's stop the chaos of trade wars, arbitrary pauses, crazy tariffs, and threats. The American people sent us here for solutions. They don't need more tariffs that are really taxes on their cost of living.

America's trade accounts need balancing. We don't need to keep hemorrhaging. That will be the real test. The accounts will be the real test at the end of this year, but they are already not looking good.

Yet, you don't make it better by killing the patient, the American worker, with higher prices on everything that they buy and by jerking away millions of dollars, the cumulative wealth of their retirement accounts.

America must achieve free trade among free people, not more tariff chaos. Passover and Easter Reflections

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to put in a word. In our office, as all of this has been going on, I thought a lot about my own faith and how to help the American people who are so worried about what is going on.

I did some reflection on the faith community in which I was baptized and still belong. Next Sunday, for us, is the most profound holy day. We commemorate Easter, and it holds profound meaning.

This coming Saturday, in Judaism, Jews around our globe and throughout our Nation will sit down for a Passover Seder.

For both religions, this weekend is one of the most significant religious holidays in the calendar year, with expression and remembrance on the importance of treasuring our heritage and endowment.

For 2,000 years or more, these days have expressed faith that can move the human conscience. Faith motivates people's behavior to think about the difference between daily life and the divine and what life could be.

Christians are encouraged to be a sacrificial people and, importantly, a resurrection people. Jews think of how hard it was for their ancestors escaping Egypt and are thankful for all the joys that they have in modern life.

With Easter and Passover in mind, I wish to place on the record today reflections as a result of the Trump administration's recent actions that are causing anxiety among the people who I represent. These holy days seem to be a proper time to pray for them, to remember them, and to seriously ask ourselves what we can do together to heal them, our Nation, and our people.

Days ago, I was approached by a kind nurse who had endured a hard day. She shared with me that a patient of hers in a local healthcare center had immigrated to our country legally to work as a common laborer. She had fled a troubled Latin American country where thugs controlled the streets.

Leaving all behind, the worker had journeyed here from a place where there was no hope for a better future. Then, last week here in America, very sadly, she attempted to take her own life with a fentanyl overdose because she feared being arrested by Trump administration immigration officials.

She could not imagine going back to the hell from which she had come. Here with no help to understand the law that she came here by, that she could work in America, she was frozen with fear because of what she saw on TV.

I immediately thought of the last words uttered by Jesus as he was put to death by those who could not accept his religious teachings. He asked: ``Father, Father, why have You forsaken me?''

This also parallels the story of Passover with the Jewish people fleeing Egypt in search of a better life, where they could live free from bondage and fear.

Are we not to care for strangers in a strange land, to treat our neighbors as we would want to be treated? Do we leave them to wander the desert or return to horror? Do we offer a hand out and up to ensure that they can live in safety and security? I think this is a weekend for examining our own conscience.

My office has heard an influx of others fleeing horror, seeking shelter, scared that they will be sent back somewhere. Haitians who were here legally and working were scared in Ohio that they would be sent back to the streets of Port-au-Prince that are controlled by warlord gangsters and roving bandits. Who would want to go back to that? These are people who are working, and every company I know is looking for workers right now.

Local churches, synagogues, and mosques help to resettle Ukrainians here legally who are fleeing war-torn regions in their homeland. Those Ukrainians all received an erroneous email last week.

Imagine, when their relatives are fighting and dying in another country, and they are here trying to hold their family together in some minimal way, them receiving a letter saying that they would be able to self-deport before it was claimed to be sent in error. In other words, some person in some agency sent out the wrong letter, which causes even more anxiety and fear in families who are already suffering.

What kind of a country are we becoming?

This week, our district staff took a call from a senior citizen who has ordered her prescription drugs from Canada for many years. She receives them by mail because she can't walk. She is deeply worried that, with the new 10 percent Trump tariffs across the board, the price of her medicine will go up beyond her ability to afford it.

There are a lot of people in charge of things here in Washington who can't think in front of their own noses. They have never faced these situations.

I asked myself: What would Jesus do? The Jewish people, who leave the door open and a seat for Elijah, what would they do?

Our President has even threatened higher tariffs on all imported medicine. Boy, that is a hard sock to the gut. This isn't something someone who cares about people and their health and well-being would do or should do.

If I were his mother, I would scold him.

Our office is receiving numerous inquiries from retirees, working people who worked hard and are deeply concerned about the drop in value of their 401(k) retirement plans that they worked for.

Those just lost enormous value in the financial markets as the Trump tariffs traded away the value of their earnings. Meanwhile, the cost of everything keeps rising. Where I live, the price of gas rose 75 cents more a gallon than I paid a week before.

I have heard from mothers worried their daughters and granddaughters will lose their Medicaid coverage for mental health care and treatment. God bless every American family that has a child with mental illness or a relative with mental illness. You are saints caring for them.

A wife called worried her husband going through chemo for cancer treatment would lose his Medicaid because of the cuts that are being proposed here just 3 years before he becomes Medicare eligible.

If families are denied access to Medicaid without the finances to cover care, what will happen to them? If your family is lucky and you have never had an ill relative, you are lucky because there are millions of people across this country that are suffering as I deliver these remarks tonight. Walk in their shoes.

People on Medicare are about to lose access to telehealth. This is terrible. Many seniors can't walk. I have neighbors. One lady fell out of her bed. She couldn't get off the floor. She had one of those things on her neck that she pushes and then the ambulances came from the local fire department.

There are a lot of people living at the edge. We have to be concerned about them. We can't cut their benefits. These are just some of the countless stories and fears we hear. There are hundreds and thousands more reaching out to Members of Congress in fear for themselves, their families, their loved ones, and treasured members of their community.

America does not live in fear. That isn't why our country was founded. We have been a refuge for our entire history, and we need to continue to be a refuge for those seeking a better life. Who will speak up for these people while they are painted as worthless or not worthy of a place in our country by those who just want to slash and burn and tax and deport and destroy?

Jesus' last words were uttered in the Aramaic language, and he breathed his last breath asking why he had been forsaken. We can ask this for people we know and we can do something to help. Some of us must ask during Passover and Easter week who is being forsaken in this wild rush to endow the billionaire class with more, more vast infusions of money taken out of the hides and hearts of the American people?

What would Jesus do? What would Moses do? Why won't we as a country and a people ask ourselves the question of how we can help, not hurt? How can we help and not hurt?

Let us recommit to that objective in the greatest Nation in the world that needs caring leadership and those that truly are capable of loving one another and other people.

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