An emergency in the making for Republicans

Opinion

The phrase “fake news” might be the most frequently invoked epithet in U.S. President Donald Trump’s lexicon; it has been repeated, quite literally, ad nauseam by the twice-elected U.S. president with equal measures of contempt and glee throughout his tumultuous political career.

This week, however, Trump has been forced to grapple with another flippantly worded and equally confrontational phrase that is being used to lay bare the specious rationale for his irrational tariff/trade assault on America’s most reliable ally and neighbour: “Made-up emergency.”

The description was used by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine (Virginia) to underpin a bill he co-sponsored to challenge the emergency declaration employed by the president to justify the imposition of sweeping tariffs against Canada as part of a larger trade-dispute escalation with essentially all of the U.S.’s traditional partners in global commerce.

In unleashing his punitive measures on Canada, Trump invoked an obscure piece of legislation known as the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), stating the movement of illegal drugs — specifically fentanyl — across the Canada-U.S. border poses a national security threat and the imposition of tariffs is intended to force Canada to take action to stem the flow.

The problem, as Kaine’s co-sponsored bill points out, is that there is no such “flow” of drugs from Canada into the U.S. (in truth, less than one per cent of the fentanyl entering the U.S. moves across the Canadian border) and the so-called “Trump tariffs” are what poses a threat to Americans’ lives and livelihoods.

“We’re here to stop a huge national sales tax that’s being imposed on Americans through these Canadian tariffs that are based on a fake Canadian emergency,” Kaine told assembled media outside the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, as he and Democratic co-sponsors Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota) and Mark Warner (Virginia) awaited Wednesday’s Senate-floor vote.

“Canada is a friend, not an adversary. Canada is a sovereign nation, not a 51st state. And while we always have challenges with friends, we have a mechanism that Donald Trump negotiated — the CUSMA (Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement) — that enables us to work through trade deals. We don’t need tariffs at all.”

Hearing U.S. legislators directly challenge Trump’s inflammatory tariff rhetoric surely comes as a welcome relief to Canadians who have grown sick and tired of the seemingly ceaseless trade threats and annexation nonsense. But what Kaine and company set in motion can only, at very best, deliver a symbolic message to the ever-mercurial president.

On Wednesday, four Senate Republicans — Rand Paul (Kentucky), who co-sponsored the bill, and fellow GOP members Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) — voted to end the emergency declaration, allowing the measure to pass by a 51-47 margin.

However, the resolution now has to navigate the House of Representatives — where the Republican majority will likely block it from going to a vote — and even if it passed there, Trump (who labelled the four GOP supporters “disloyal”) has stated he will veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

What’s noteworthy is that Wednesday’s vote forced senators to go on the record regarding Trump’s Canada tariffs and that its passage demonstrates to the White House the precarious nature of Republicans’ grasp on power as Trump embarks on an economic agenda that will massively impact the bottom lines of average Americans.

As the at-home impacts of Trump’s misguided tariff agenda begin to sink in for Americans and the U.S. moves toward its 2026 midterm elections, the Republican party might find itself facing a ballot-box emergency entirely of its own making.