When Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, talks about what it is like to discuss trade with Trump administration officials, her description is similar to the way those same officials describe discussions with Chinese negotiators: It’s not clear what the other side wants or is willing to do, and things they thought the other side had previously agreed to do are subject to change.
Ernst, a 48-year-old former National Guard lieutenant colonel and a first-term senator from the agriculture-heavy state of Iowa, has backed President Trump on most issues but takes a skeptical view of the tariffs. She says they can be useful in bringing trade partners to the negotiating table, but they have to be temporary and must be removed once they have served that purpose so they don’t hurt the economy. Trump disagrees, she says, considering tariffs too potent and too useful to be dropped.
“They still believe that tariffs, and even the threat of tariffs, work,” Ernst said. “What I try to explain to the president and to the trade representative is that Iowans don’t like these tariffs.”
Trump is popular among Iowa Republicans, Ernst noted, but the tariffs he has implemented — and the tariffs trading partners have levied in response — have been “devastating” in the state. Iowa State University economist Dermot Hayes has estimated that Mexico’s retaliatory tariffs alone reduced live hog values by $12 per animal in 2018. Iowa is by far the nation’s largest hog-producing state. “One young man I talked to recently said he had hoped to take over the family farm and he said he couldn’t do it anymore and had to take off-farm employment instead,” she said.
[Related: Trump tariffs costing Americans $1.4 billion a month in income, study says]
Ernst, like many others when the administration’s trade push first began, assumed that the plan all along was to withdraw the tariffs once the trade deals with China, Canada, Mexico, and other trade partners were finished. Instead, the administration has resisted lifting tariffs even after the conclusion of talks on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and in recent weeks, Trump has talked vaguely about keeping at least some tariffs in place for the long term.
Ernst and other lawmakers that have been able to talk directly to Trump, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and other White House officials say it is difficult to get them to commit to anything.
“The president said a number of months ago that once we have these deals in place, the tariffs won’t be necessary. … [But] I have not gotten any assurances. And I would like to know that we will remove the tariffs,” she told the Washington Examiner. “There has been nothing definitive.”
The result is that Republicans like Ernst find themselves in the awkward position of directly lobbying the White House to ease off and not block off trade in the process of establishing a strong negotiating position. To get the White House to pay attention, they’ve aired their message in public. “If these tariffs aren’t lifted, USMCA is dead,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a late April Wall Street Journal op-ed.
[Also read: Grassley warns Trump that tariffs on Mexico and Canada will kill his NAFTA replacement]
Such aggressive messaging outside the traditional lines of communication between Congress and the White House seems to be the only way to get through to the Trump team, she said. “I think that’s a good way to message back to the president. … If he wants those tariffs deals to go forward, and hopefully he does, then we should see those tariffs lifted,” Ernst said.
Ernst argued that she does support the president, noting that she wants the USMCA to pass. She cited, as evidence that the deal will aid the economy, an analysis of the deal released by the International Trade Commission late last month, which estimated that the deal would boost U.S. gross domestic product by $68.2 billion and add 176,000 jobs.
“At the same time, I would have loved to have been part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We’re not part of TPP, so what else are we going to do in the meantime?” she asked, referring to a trade deal involving 12 Pacific nations that the Obama administration negotiated but that Trump pulled the U.S. out of as one of his first acts in office.
Trump’s use of national security powers to unilaterally impose tariffs has pushed Republicans into rethinking what the White House’s tariff powers should be. Ernst has co-sponsored legislation introduced by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, himself a former U.S. trade representative, that would limit the president’s ability to use national security as an excuse for creating new tariffs. Portman’s bill would require the Defense Department to sign off that national security is implicated in any tariffs decision. However, Ernst opposes the tougher legislation by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., that would require new tariffs to have congressional approval, saying that the White House’s hands cannot be tied that way.
[Related: US threatens China with tariffs for intellectual property violations]
“The way we are looking at it, Sen. Portman and I, is that if there are national security implications, then who better to determine that than the Department of Defense?” she said. “It would still allow the use of those tariffs without going through Congress but there would be an additional layer of justification for it.”
For now, Ernst and other Republicans will continue to hammer away at the White House on the issue despite their disagreements.
“We need to keep pressing forward. We’ll continue to have those conversations with the president and he will still start to see the impact,” she said. “I am hopeful that if we continue to send that message to the president, he will see the wisdom in pulling back on the tariffs.”
