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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I rise to support my colleague Senator Kaine's joint resolution to terminate the Trump order placing blanket tariffs on products Americans buy from Canada.

I am going to start by saying, as the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, I am always struck by how much doubletalk there is about trade. So let's be clear as we start this part of the discussion.

Tariffs are taxes on things we buy from other countries. The bottom line is, those taxes make it more expensive for Americans to buy those products. No other country pays the tariffs. Let me repeat that. No other country pays the tariffs. The consumer pays the tariff. So if somebody tells you they can do tariffs and do it without raising prices--I am sorry, but anybody who says that with a straight face is basically taking advantage of you.

Every credible economist, every automaker, every business on the record has said that Trump's trade taxes are going to make things more expensive for Americans.

Ronald Reagan's favorite economist, Art Laffer, just released a study showing auto tariffs are going to raise car prices by $4,700. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the full Trump tariff scheme is going to cost an average family thousands of dollars a year.

It is one thing if tariffs are imposed with a good strategy, like decreasing sales in the United States by raising prices to punish countries that cheat on trade and changing their behavior so that U.S. workers get a fair shake.

I have consistently supported targeted tariffs in the past as a tool to fight back against trade cheating, especially by China. When China was stealing America's trade secrets, subsidizing cheap solar panels, and then dumping them here to drive U.S. manufacturers out of business, we were shouting from the rooftops for more tariffs on Chinese goods.

But Canada is not China. Canada is America's closest ally, not a rival. Making everything Americans buy from Canada more expensive for some bogus reason is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal ``the dumbest trade war in history.''

There are 8 million American jobs that depend on trade with Canada. Canada is the biggest export market for 32 States. It provides raw materials and potash that so often farmers need to grow their crops. U.S. farmers can't replace 90 percent of potash that comes from Canada, definitely not overnight. The only choice is higher prices--again, higher prices paid for by Americans.

So the stuff we buy from Canada gets more expensive. And on top of that, in response, Canada has already slapped tariffs on a whole host of crops, ag products, dairy, alcohol, manufactured goods. The list goes on and on.

Canadian grocery stores pulled U.S. products off the shelves. Our small businesses and farmers are losing sales as we speak because of the weird obsession in the Trump administration with attacking our northern neighbor.

Plunging our economy into a recession because of the Trump desire to annex Canada is just bizarre--bizarre even by Washington, DC, standards.

Congress has delegated far too much of its authority to the executive branch, and it is far past time for the Congress to take it back. In 1962 and 1974, Congress passed laws handing the President major portions of our constitutional power over tariffs. It is time to reverse that trend. Those dates I mentioned were before my time, but I want everybody to know, on our watch, I think this has got to be a bipartisan concern. We have got to take these powers back, because if Republicans say it is not their fault that Trump is destroying our economy, why not do something like this to restore the power of Congress to set tariffs?

I am going to close by addressing the bogus claim of the Trump administration that tariffs are actually intended to stop fentanyl trafficking from Canada. Let me be clear. Our immigration system needs reform, and the fentanyl crisis is a serious issue.

Oregon is no stranger to the devastating effects it has wreaked on our economy communities. The reality is, there is no crisis at the northern border. Less than 0.1 percent of fentanyl entering the United States comes from Canada. Fentanyl seizures at the northern border are down over 97 percent from July 2024.

I think almost everybody understands that Canada is not the issue here. Instead of coming up with real solutions to get fentanyl off the streets and out of our communities, Donald Trump has decided he would rather make threats and tariff our closest allies.

My colleague from Alabama is on the floor, and we are going to have a little bit of a discussion. We just talked about how we are going to handle it. But I want to be clear. If Donald Trump and the Republicans wanted to address fentanyl in an effective way, they would pass my bill to limit the millions of low-value packages that come into the United States from China and elsewhere. Getting a handle on these so-called ``de minimis'' imports will help our border agents detect the illicit imports of things like fentanyl and pill presses before they reach communities in the United States.

So with that, Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 1185 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration, the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I listened very carefully to my colleague from Alabama, and I don't believe my colleague used the word ``fentanyl,'' and that is what we are concerned about in the Pacific Northwest. We are concerned that fentanyl has hit our country and our region like a wrecking ball.

So maybe when this all gets sorted out, he will support my bill to crack down on fentanyl everywhere through reforms of this de minimis issue. And I would just say, for purposes of our discussion now, I understand--and we all await the announcement, I gather, sometime late this afternoon--the Trump administration only is going to address de minimis shipments from China and nowhere else.

We have to make this comprehensive. My colleague serving as the Presiding Officer knows what it is like in the West with fentanyl hitting us so hard. If you just do it with China, Chinese companies are going to circumvent the rules and transship through other countries.

That is why I felt so strongly about a comprehensive solution to get at this fentanyl, this poison, that has hit us so hard, because if you just go to one country, what you are going to have is something called merchandise laundering. We saw it when we did an investigation in the committee.

A Chinese company ships its product through an intermediary in Vietnam or another third country. The intermediary then slaps a ``Made in Vietnam'' sticker on the Chinese product and falsely labels the product, and they can easily evade the Chinese product restrictions. And with millions of shipments coming in from China, there is no way for Customs and Border Protection to police Chinese products transshipped through third companies.

This is not a new gimmick. Chinese companies have been circumventing tariffs all this time with products like steel and solar panels. I have been bird-dogging this issue since I passed the Enforce and Protect Act nearly a decade ago.

My de minimis bill that I hope to get bipartisan support for would stop the flood of low-value packages from all countries on a global scale. That is the only way to deal with this problem--not create, as my colleague from Alabama would do, a gigantic game of Whack-A-Mole.

So I hope we will be back on this floor doing something comprehensive to fight the scourge of fentanyl, and I proposed it with legislation.

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