The US Senate on Tuesday approved a measure that would end Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Brazilian imports, including coffee, beef and other products, in a rare show of opposition to the president’s bipartisan trade war.
The resolution, led by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, seeks to reverse the national emergency that Trump declared to justify the levies. But it is almost certain to stall in the US House, where the Republican-controlled chamber has preemptively blocked any attempt to block the president’s tariffs.
Even if the measure were to reach the president’s desk, it would satisfy Trump’s veto.
“Tariffs are taxes on American consumers. Tariffs are taxes on American businesses. And they are taxes imposed by one person: Donald J. Trump,” Kaine said in the speech.
“Tariffs make it more expensive to build and buy in America. The economic damage of trade wars is not the exception to history, but the rule,” Republican Rep. Mitch McConnell said in a statement Tuesday. “And no reading of Reagan reveals anything else.
The renewed push in the Senate comes on the heels of a vote in April in which four Republicans sided with Democrats to support a measure that would lift tariffs on Canada. Among them were Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, former Republican leader McConnell, Rand Paul of Kentucky, who co-sponsored the legislation.
However, a subsequent effort to block Trump’s tariffs on “Liberation Day” failed, with two supporters of the effort missing a vote that needed a simple majority for approval.
In July, Trump declared a national emergency in light of “recent policies, practices and actions by the Brazilian government” that he said posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”
Speaking to reporters, Kaine suggested the tariffs were in retaliation for Brazil’s prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, a close Trump ally, was convicted in September and sentenced to 27 years in prison for the 2022 coup attempt.
