Democrats Winning Congress Would Shift the Tariff Debate — but Not Roll Back Trump's Tariffs, Reuters Finds
Two days before the midterms, Reuters lays out the trade math: a Democratic Congress could open oversight hearings and force symbolic rollback votes, but President Donald Trump's veto — and no veto-proof majority in any scenario — would leave the tariffs standing.
President Donald Trump's trade agenda will face a new source of friction if Democrats win control of Congress on Tuesday, with a cascade of oversight hearings and symbolic tariff rollback votes likely next year — but Trump will remain undeterred in his push for more tariff actions, trade experts and congressional aides told Reuters in a report published Sunday.
The arithmetic is the story. Democrats need a net gain of four seats in both chambers to overturn Republicans' narrow majorities — 218-214 in the House and 53-47 in the Senate — and opinion polls favor Democrats to win the House while the Senate remains too close to call, Reuters reported. That leaves Democrats far short of a veto-proof two-thirds majority in any scenario, so legislation negating the tariffs would run into the president's veto even if it passed. 'Democrats are going to try a lot of things. I just don't think anything's going to get across the finish line because neither party will have a veto-proof majority in any scenario,' William Reinsch, a non-resident adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters.
What a Democratic majority could do is change the volume. Reuters reported that Democrats could stage votes on long-sidelined bills such as Senator Chuck Schumer's 'End Trump's Tariff Tax Act,' which would scrap the statutes backing the punitive tariffs on Canadian goods and the temporary 10 percent global tariffs and refund the duties collected under them; the bill has 28 co-sponsors, including Senator Ron Wyden, who told Reuters that 'one of the most obvious priorities would be repealing Trump's tariffs on Canada, which are raising prices and harming communities on both sides of the border.' Committee gavels would also bring oversight hearings into the tariff-exemption process, the impact on small businesses, and the investment funds pledged by Japan, South Korea and other trading partners.
The White House, in Reuters' account, is not bracing for a rollback. The administration is developing plans to rely more heavily on executive actions, including on trade, and a forthcoming investigation covers excess industrial capacity in 16 major trading partners. 'President Trump will never waver from putting America First, whether in trade negotiations or through an economic agenda of tax cuts and deregulation,' White House spokesman Matthew Middleton said in an emailed statement to Reuters, adding that the agenda 'has already secured almost 20 fair trade deals and trillions in manufacturing investments.' Greta Peisch, a former general counsel at the U.S. Trade Representative's office, told Reuters the effort could still matter beyond this Congress: even without the votes now, it could 'form the basis of a proposal for the presidential elections' and shape how Congress thinks about trade law over the next two to four years.
