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Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. 1593 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, you know, I am very troubled that the Senator from Ohio has objected because, obviously, what I am trying to do here on the Senate floor is to make it possible for there to be an exemption for small businesses in our country. Small businesses are 97 percent of our businesses, and they are 30 percent of all companies that engage in trade.

Right now, small businesses are caught in a crossfire. They are seeing this chaotic world of tariffs that the President is engaging in absolutely ripple through their business plans. And it is all across our Nation.

The reason that I have risen today as the ranking member on the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee is to draw the attention to Main Street being turned into ``Pain Street'' all across our country.

Big companies, they are in a position where they can forward order by 6 months the inventory which they need. They can do planning that is absolutely outside of the capacity of a small business in our country.

Small businesses live week to week, month to month, and they are, right now, trying to plan for what the future might look like. It changes day to day, and it changes product to product, depending upon which country President Trump is playing games with on that particular day, minute--just impulsive commentary out of the President.

There is, without question, an impact on small businesses, because that recklessness is being felt by small businesses. These rising prices are affecting them disproportionately.

In response to the President's dramatic tariff escalation, on Thursday night--which is going to go down in history; it is going to go down in history, Thursday night, as one of the most important economic days in the history of our country. My goal was to just seek unanimous consent for my Small Business Liberation Act to be put in place, which exempts small businesses from the tariff wars. It gets them out of the crossfire.

When he was running for President, Donald Trump said:

Starting on day one, we will end inflation and [we will] make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.

Yet after 6 months in office, things have gotten more expensive, as evidenced by Thursday's concerning inflation reading. That is true whether you are buying supplies to run a business like a restaurant, a store, or a small factory, or you are a consumer shopping for everyday items like groceries or clothing or shoes or school supplies for your kids.

Parents are going to be out in the next few weeks buying the school supplies, buying new clothing for their kids. And the prices have already gone up, and they are going to be going up higher. We are going to see the same thing when people are out buying things before Thanksgiving, buying items before Christmas. Prices are going up, and it is going to be rippling through our economy.

Now, with yesterday's very discouraging jobs report, we see the terrible bind in which the President has left our country.

What was Trump's reaction to yesterday's very, very disappointing jobs report? It wasn't to end his chaotic policies, which are casting a cloud over our economy for the last 4 months; it was to fire the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was just her job and all of those dedicated employees to bring the news to the President. Instead of accepting it and deciding to adjust his economic policies, he just fired the person who brought the news, fired the messenger of the news--by the way, leaving economists, on a bipartisan basis, across the country to be criticizing the President over the last 24 years, because they rely upon the accuracy of those numbers.

Economic data does not lie. Donald Trump does lie. He lies about almost everything.

In an ordinary world, a poor jobs report might cause the Fed to lower interest rates. The Fed has a dual mandate: maximum employment and price stability at the same time. But because of the President's chaotic tariff policies, the Federal Reserve can't lower rates without risking making inflation even worse. And inflation is increasing.

Without tariffs, lowering interest rates might be an easy call. Rising unemployment and weak job numbers would mean cutting rates. But the Fed can't ignore the extraordinary amount of uncertainty and confusion the President's trade war has injected into the economy, especially with regard to prices.

The New York Times wrote this week:

Mr. Powell emphasized that there was still substantial uncertainty about how much more consumer prices will rise in response to Mr. Trump's tariffs . . . [following] a notable jump in inflation in June.

Chairman Powell knows what every small business owner in America knows: Tariffs drive up costs. He has watched, along with the rest of us, as they have risen since President Trump took office, and he knows that so long as the threat of tariffs hangs over this Nation, they are likely to increase even further.

This is just a sales tax that he is imposing on every good coming into our country. And that price is then reflected in an evaluation of the increase in inflation. It is pretty simple. So you can't, in any way, argue that there is not a direct correlation, a direct relationship.

The President would have you believe this doesn't matter. But that just shows how little he cares about how much businesses and families have to pay for the things which they need.

So on Thursday, we saw Chairman Powell's predictions about rising costs borne out with the latest inflation reading, which showed the price of goods across industries moving in the wrong direction due to tariffs.

But you don't have to read the Wall Street Journal to know things are more expensive than they were before the President launched his trade war. Just talk to the owner of your local small business. Ask them if their supply costs are going up. Ask them if they know what has been happening since the President started whipsawing the economy on Liberation Day--or what should really be called Obliteration Day--for Main Street across the country and the customers of Main Street.

The unemployment rate is going up. How can small business owners be hiring new people if they are uncertain about what that tariff environment is going to be?

Take coffee. Just take coffee, for example, which the President seems to think we should tax. Only 1 percent of coffee Americans consume is grown in the United States--in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, to be precise. Onshoring coffee, like many other products we use every day--bananas are another good example--is not an option. We have to import it.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, coffee prices have already gone up 30 percent compared to this time last year, and that is before we see the 50-percent tariff the President is threatening Brazil with in the hope that he can pressure--Trump can pressure--Brazil, the supreme court of Brazil, into dropping the case against coup-plotter Jair Bolsonaro inside of the country of Brazil as a part of the domestic political scene in Brazil. Trump wants to use tariffs on Brazil as a way of influencing their judicial system.

Who is going to pay the price? Well, the people who are going to pay the price are the people who buy coffee in the United States of America. He wants to impose a 50-percent tariff on Brazil. Brazil imports account for one-third of the coffee consumed in the United States, so this additional tariff is going to make for a particularly bitter brew of coffee for American consumers. ``Good to the last drop'' this is not.

Similarly, restaurants are seeing the costs of their ingredients rise and grocery stores are paying more to stock their shelves. Grocery prices were 2.4 percent higher than a year ago. But the Yale Budget Lab expects food costs to rise by an additional 3.4 percent in the short run.

Fresh produce could go up as much as 6.9 percent in the coming months because of tariffs. For the cost of clothing, that increase is a staggering 37.5 percent. And keep in mind that all of these forecasts were made before the President unleashed a slew of new tariffs on Thursday night.

What about small manufacturers that the President claims he wants to save? Well, they can't afford to purchase the equipment and materials they need because their expenses are rising as well.

According to the Institute of Supply Management, the cost of manufacturing materials increased by 17 percent. The cost of manufacturing materials increased by 17 percent during the first 6 months of this year.

Over the past 3 months, we have lost 37,000 manufacturing jobs. Can I say that? Trump says he wants to return manufacturing to America. In the last 3 months, we have lost 37,000 manufacturing jobs.

This would suggest that tariffs are setting domestic manufacturing back and not moving it forward.

The Trump tariffs will disproportionately affect low-income individuals, women, and minorities by increasing costs on household goods that these groups spend a large portion of their income on, including clothes and groceries and household appliances.

By the way, in general, women and minorities are not running big businesses in America. They are over here in small businesses. That is where minorities are. That is where Black and Brown entrepreneurs are. That is where women are. They are in small businesses. So they are not only going to be disproportionately harmed, those small businesses, but then consumers who are poor, they are going to be hurt.

As we look past the summer and into the fall, I want everyone to think about where this continued economic insanity is leading us.

Rising prices will mean that parents will have to spend more to buy clothes and shoes for their kids as they head back to school. It will mean putting food on the table is a lot more expensive. It will mean the holiday season is a lot less joyful when we have to cut back on gifts for our families. And for small businesses, it will mean they will have to choose between stocking their shelves and paying their workers. This is tragic because it is completely avoidable.

It is time for us to stand up to the President and end this tariff madness for small businesses in our country, for ordinary Americans in our country before it becomes more and more unaffordable for those small business owners and it becomes more and more unaffordable for their customers.

Small businesses are crying out for some certainty and stability after 4 months of chaos and confusion. We must stand up for them and grant them the relief which they are looking for.

And I am joined by the national Chamber of Commerce in asking for that relief. This is a letter which I have in my hand from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to Secretary Bessent and Secretary Lutnick.

Here is what they say. They say:

The Chamber requests the administration take immediate action to save America's small businesses and stave off a recession. Specifically, while you continue to negotiate, we are asking that the administration immediately use its tariff flexibility to implement a tariff exclusion process that:

Provides an automatic exclusion from the new tariffs for any small business importer.

This is the Chamber of Commerce speaking:

Small businesses do not have the margin or the capital reserves to sustain the increased tariffs, nor do they have the ability to quickly modify supply chains.

That is what my unanimous consent was all about. Just get these businesses, these small businesses, out of this economic war. Preserve them. Otherwise, those are the businesses that are going to, unfortunately, experience an extinction experience.

Those are the businesses that are going to be laying off people, increasingly, in large numbers.

So from my perspective, this is without question a very important motion on the floor. The Senator from Ohio has objected to exempting small businesses from the tariff regime, and I think ultimately we are going to see that those small businesses are the economic canaries in the mine shaft, that they are the ones who are suffering now. We are seeing it already in the inflationary numbers and in the higher unemployment rates and in the economic slowdown that has been reported just in the last week.

That is all I have been asking of the Republicans--just get these small businesses out of this fight. So it is very, very disheartening to me to know that the Republicans are standing here and objecting to that protection for small businesses in our country.

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I request that I be allowed to finish my unanimous consent request.

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I would just say this. Right now, here is what American small businesses know: Unemployment is going up. Inflation is going up. Tariffs are going up.

It is a tax. It is a sales tax that all Americans are paying. It is having a profoundly negative impact on our Nation. People are having Pepto Bismol moments in the marketplace, on Main Street, across our country. They are having Maalox moments in the marketplace. Their stomachs are churning as they look at all of this economic data.

Lutnick and Bessent are the Smoot-Hawley of the 21st century. We already did this once with Smoot-Hawley. They are repeating history. As Mark Twain said, there is no educational benefit to the second kick of a mule. This country got kicked in the behind by Smoot-Hawley, and Lutnick, Bessent, and President Trump are about to have that second kick affect every American in a profoundly negative way.

I thank the Presiding Officer for granting me that unanimous consent 1 minute in the continuation of debate.

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