Four Senate Republicans joined Democrats to pass a resolution rejecting President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada on Wednesday.
The 50-46 vote is largely symbolic since the Republican-led House won’t be advancing the measure, but it still highlights GOP dissent toward aspects of Trump’s trade policy. Wednesday’s vote also follows another vote on Tuesday when the Senate passed a resolution aimed at blocking Trump’s tariffs on Brazil.
The Senate is set to take a third vote on Trump’s tariffs, focusing on a slew of other countries, on Thursday.
Wednesday’s resolution would nullify the emergency declaration Trump used to impose the tariffs on Canada if it passed both chambers of Congress.
GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) voted with Democrats to support the measure rebuking the levies on Canada.
Paul has stressed the detrimental effects these tariffs can have and argued that Trump isn’t constitutionally allowed to impose them without congressional approval.
“Tariffs are taxes on imports paid by American consumers. Congress, not the president, has the constitutional authority to levy taxes,” Paul and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) wrote in a Tuesday Washington Post opinion piece. “Massive tariffs on close trading partners such as Brazil and Canada are ill-advised abuses of presidential power that will make Americans poorer.”
Trump recently blew up trade talks with Canada after the province of Ontario ran an anti-tariff ad featuring a voice-over with the words of former President Ronald Reagan. He said he’d impose another 10% tariff on top of existing levies he’d announced against the country earlier this year.
Kaine argued that the resolution’s Senate passage could potentially influence the president.
“When he sees Republicans starting to vote against his policies, even in small numbers, that makes an impression on him and can often cause him to alter his behavior,” Kaine told reporters.