After the Trump administration announced on Monday it will impose tariffs of up to 24 percent on Canadian lumber, the National Association of Home Builders said it was “deeply disappointed in this short-sighted action.” A previous NAHB study suggested such tariffs would raise the price of new homes by more than 4 percent.
But Republicans on Capitol Hill don’t seem too worried.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told President Trump at a private dinner at the White House Monday night that he backed the retaliatory measure. “I told the president, ‘It’s good to punch back,” Graham told THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Tuesday in the Capitol. “Just give our milk guys fair treatment and we’ll deal with lumber fairly. I like the idea of hitting back.”
The lumber tariff was announced days after Trump called Canada’s treatment of American dairy farmers a “disgrace.” The Commerce Department said the new tariff was justified by a determination that Canada had wrongly given its lumber companies subsidies of 3 percent to 24 percent.
Lindsey Graham has a mixed record on trade, but even two GOP senators with strong histories of backing free trade said Tuesday that they were only somewhat concerned by the new tariffs. “I’m a little bit concerned about it, but I haven’t had the chance to drill down on it,” Pennsylvania senator and former Club for Growth president Pat Toomey told TWS.
“It’s always a bit risky when you think about trade wars and how they start,” Arizona senator John McCain told me. “But frankly I haven’t looked into it enough to really make a knowledgeable judgment, which is not my usual excuse.”
“That’s been an issue that’s been out there for many, many years,” McCain said. Indeed, as the New York Times reported Tuesday, “At the conflict’s heart is a fundamental difference in forestry ownership. In the United States, forest lands are largely held by lumber companies. In Canada, they tend to be owned by the government, and American mills contend that Canadian provinces subsidize their industries by charging low royalty rates for cutting trees. A temporary truce under President George W. Bush, which effectively limited Canadian exports to the United States, expired in 2015.”
Several other GOP senators, including Rand Paul of Kentucky, Cory Gardner of Colorado, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, declined to comment or said they hadn’t studied the issue enough to make a judgment. Senator Mike Lee of Utah has argued that Congress has ceded far too much authority to the executive branch to raise tariffs and has introduced legislation that would require congressional approval of executive actions on trade. But Lee also declined to comment Tuesday on the the administration’s new tariff.
Although Trump’s campaign rhetoric and inaugural address pointed toward a strongly protectionist agenda, his actions on trade as president have pretty much been limited to withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and now the new Canadian lumber tariffs.
