When President Donald Trump first announced in March that he would impose far-reaching tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum without congressional approval, South Carolina Republican Mark Sanford was the first lawmaker to tell me that Congress should step in to prevent it. “The nature of the party in power is that everybody wants to be deferential to the executive branch, but that’s not what the Founding Fathers intended,” Sanford said at the time. “Doing anything less than robustly pushing back against a stupid and destructive and dangerous idea … would come back to haunt all of us,” he predicted.
On June 12, Sanford lost reelection to a primary challenger, Katie Arrington, who is more eager to support the president. The congressman—always one to call it like he sees it—had provoked Trump’s rage by criticizing him, seemingly without fear of the political repercussions. Most of Sanford’s colleagues in the House have not exhibited similar carelessness. And when it comes to trade, the South Carolinian’s loss serves as another example to congressional Republicans of what could go wrong if they oppose Trump’s protectionist impulses and support free trade, a tenet many of them have faithfully espoused for years.
Indeed, Trump’s aggressive use of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act—a provision intended to be employed in cases of national security—presents a political conundrum for Republicans. Opposing Trump’s tariffs by passing legislation to curtail his trade powers would spark a backlash among the president’s loyalists at the polls. But American consumers and industries might become collateral damage in the trade war launched by Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on steel imports and 10 percent tariffs on foreign aluminum, both of which threaten to undermine the Republican party’s midterm election message of economic growth. Republican leaders weighed their options and have come up with an admittedly insufficient solution: Remain deferential to the president while airing half-hearted complaints about his trade policies. In other words, GOP lawmakers are all bark and no bite.
After Trump announced the tariffs, Republicans were quick to urge the White House to tailor them to affect China rather. And their strategy of pleading and hoping for the best worked—at first. Trump included indefinite exemptions for close trading partners when the tariffs went into effect.
But the Republicans’ objections weren’t strong enough to stop Trump from scrapping the exemptions held by countries such as Canada, Mexico, and members of the European Union at the end of May. The move, which alienated allies and resulted in retaliatory tariffs being slapped on a number of American products, came just days after the president announced his plan to impose tariffs of 25 percent on foreign automobiles under the same national security justification used for tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum.
That announcement appears to have been a breaking point for some Republicans on Capitol Hill. At the time, Tennessee Republican Bob Corker was incredulous at the administration’s increasingly bold use of Section 232 authority, telling reporters there is “no rational person that could think we have a national security issue with auto manufacturing.” “It’s an abuse of that authority. It’s very blatant,” he said.
A short time later, Corker introduced a bill that would claw back some of Congress’s Article I trade powers. The measure would subject Section 232 tariffs to congressional approval. It would apply retroactively for two years, meaning Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs could be re-evaluated by the legislative branch. Corker’s bill has a bipartisan roster of cosponsors, including Democrats Heidi Heitkamp, Mark Warner, Brian Schatz, Chris Van Hollen, and Jeanne Shaheen, alongside Republicans Pat Toomey, Lamar Alexander, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Jeff Flake, Jerry Moran, Johnny Isakson, and Ben Sasse.
Trump allies, such as South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, argue that passing legislation to limit the president’s trade powers would weaken Trump’s hand in ongoing trade negotiations. And Republican leaders have been unwavering in their opposition to the bill. House speaker Paul Ryan noted that such a bill would have to secure a veto-proof majority in order to become law. “You would have to pass a law that he would want to sign into law,” Ryan told reporters. “You can do the math on that.”
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said during a press conference that he would not call up the bill for a standalone vote. Corker hoped to include the bill in an annual defense authorization measure that was up for consideration in the Senate the week of June 11, but leadership blocked his amendment from receiving a vote.
In a fiery floor speech on June 12, Corker lambasted Senate Republicans for their reluctance to “poke the bear” by holding the vote. “Well, gosh, we might upset the president. We might upset the president of the United States before the midterms. So gosh, we can’t vote on the Corker amendment because we’re taking, rightly so, the responsibilities that we have to deal with tariffs and revenues. We can’t do that because we’d be upsetting the president,” Corker yelled, mocking his colleagues. “I can’t believe it,” he added. “I would bet that 95 percent of the people on this side of the aisle support intellectually this amendment.”
During a conversation with reporters following a GOP Senate lunch meeting the same day, retiring senator Jeff Flake echoed Corker’s complaints, telling reporters it shouldn’t be so unthinkable for the Republican party to stand up for something its members have supported for decades. “This is a big part of what we stand for,” Flake said of free trade. “If Republicans can’t stand up against tariffs and for free trade, I mean, what are we here for?”
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Flake, along with Corker, is set to retire after the November midterms. That gives him more leeway to challenge Trump than Republicans who have to worry about upcoming elections. But what does it say about the state of the party that the most outspoken opponents of protectionism have been effectively driven from its ranks? Flake acknowledges the trend, but points to senators who cosponsored Corker’s bill and are still running for office. “You have Pat Toomey standing firm,” he says. “There are some, obviously, who don’t want to poke the bear,” Flake admits. “To just give [Section 232] to the president and let him use national security as a reason to block free trade? We ought to stand up. We need to stand up.”
Flake tells me he hasn’t worked to promote Corker’s bill with any GOP members in the House, but interviews with Republicans on that side of the Capitol show support among rank-and-file members for the idea. Republican Study Committee chairman Mark Walker tells me he thinks “the more that we exercise our Article I powers, the better.” He is joined by members all along the ideological spectrum, such as Florida moderate Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who says she’s in favor of anything that keeps Trump in check. And Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole, a member of the Republican whip team, tells me the Constitution is clear on matters of trade. “That’s our power,” he says.
But the fact that some members say they are willing to exercise a greater role in trade policy doesn’t mean Corker’s bill—or any similar measures—are becoming law anytime soon.
Consider the fate of Utah senator Mike Lee’s Global Trade Accountability Act. Lee was early to the issue, introducing his bill to roll back the president’s trade powers on the very first day of Trump’s presidency, January 20, 2017. Lee’s legislation is more comprehensive than Corker’s, addressing not only Section 232 but also requiring congressional approval for all unilateral trade actions, including the imposition of tariffs, new restrictions, and suspensions of or withdrawals from trade agreements. The measure has stalled since it was introduced, and it has just five cosponsors.
Lee says that getting his colleagues to support a bill like his is a challenge because members of Congress serving today are accustomed to outsourcing Article I powers to the executive and believe it is the norm. “It takes some time to get people thinking about the fact that it wasn’t always that way and that constitutionally, it’s not supposed to be that way,” Lee tells me. Asked whether Congress would take up legislation to limit Trump’s trade powers if the president were to try to proceed with something like automobile tariffs, Lee says predicting a response is difficult, but such a move would “compound the concerns that have already been expressed.”
Warren Davidson, a freshman Republican from Ohio’s Eighth District, has introduced the House companion bill to Senator Lee’s Global Trade Accountability Act. During an impromptu hallway interview, he ponders why more of his colleagues have not rallied behind the idea. Davidson recalls a March poll of Republican Study Committee members that showed that more than 87 percent of the group of nearly 160 members answered in the affirmative when asked whether Congress should be able to review and reconsider the president’s proposed tariffs. He says he was encouraged by the results of that poll and decided afterward that it would be a good time to introduce Lee’s legislation in the House. He expected to have 100 cosponsors on the bill within the first few days. Instead, the current count sits at 13. That disparity, he says, highlights the gap between policy and politics within the Republican conference.
“No one wants to be seen as opposite of the president,” Davidson says. “It’s not meant to be an adversarial bill, but it is ideologically different.” Still, he doesn’t think that should stop Republicans—or even President Trump, for that matter—from supporting his bill. “It’s not a pro-Trump or anti-Trump thing,” he tells me. “It’s more pro-Constitution.”
