Congress Must Take Action on Tariffs

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, after months and months of President Trump insisting that his tariffs are not paid by Americans, insisting that tariffs don't drive up prices, insisting that there will be no exclusions on exemptions from his liberation day tariffs that he imposed back in April, on Friday afternoon the White House very quietly released a statement that they, in fact, are exempting and carving out tariffs for a number of goods, which were blindingly obvious were going to be costing more because we do not produce any of those goods here in this country.

Included in his order are coffee, tea, fruit juices, tropical fruits, spices, bananas, oranges, and tomatoes. Obviously, if you talk to anybody who has been in a grocery store lately, the prices for all of those products have gone up by large margins, again, in the wake of the April tariffs that were put into place.

Coffee is up 19 percent. Bananas are up 7 percent. Oranges and lettuce are up 3 and 4 percent.

Again, it was so clear to anyone who was actually connected to the real world that grocery prices were going up and that we had to take steps to carve out exemptions for the sake of American consumers, our working families, and the middle class.

It was amazing to see how the President, in October, was actually giving speeches where he said prices have come way down and that we have gotten prices way down for groceries. That is the mentality which is in that White House. Again, these were tariffs that he imposed unilaterally without consulting Congress.

The question, though, is whether it is good that again there is going to be some price relief for some of these items, which never should have been tariffed to begin with. It begs the question about the rest of the economy that is getting harmed by tariffs.

The National Association of Home Builders announced after the tariffs were announced that it would raise the average cost of a new home by $11,000 because of the fact that so many parts and pieces that go into new home construction are imported. That is just a reality in our economy.

When we talk about the cost of living and affordability, if anything is close to maybe groceries, it is the cost of housing in terms of rents and getting new construction restarted.

What about that, Mr. President? Why don't we also look at what is clearly happening in our economy right now and provide relief for the American people who are groaning under the high cost of living?

The President has to look no further than the conservative Tax Foundation, which again is a right-of-center economic think tank. Its analysis is that, by October, tariffs have raised retail prices on all goods by nearly 5 percent relative to their pretariff trend line.

Instead of solving high inflation, the Trump tariffs have continued it and, in some instances, increased it. This includes a 6 percent increase for imported goods and 4.3 percent for domestic goods because a lot of our domestic goods incorporate items that, again, are imported from overseas.

The fundamental problem here is that this President believed in his mind that he himself had the power to impose these tariffs. Let's be very clear. A tariff is a tax on imported goods. It is a tax.

I am from New England. Remember the Boston Tea Party? It was about a tariff on tea that the British Government was trying to force the American colonists to pay.

A case was argued just a couple of weeks ago before the U.S. Supreme Court, where, again, the plaintiffs powerfully stated that the President did not have the authority to impose those taxes back in April. That is an Article I, Section 9 authority in the Constitution for the Congress.

For the sake of reestablishing the checks and balances in our country and for the sake of the American economy, where issues like tariffs, which require a lot of analysis, are very complex, and require Congress to be part of that decisionmaking--in fact, we are the decisionmakers, according to the Constitution--those tariffs should be struck down. We should go back to basics, which is that when we deal with tax policy, it is the power of Congress that prevails in terms of making those kinds of decisions.

The harm that has been done to the economy, the middle class, and working families because of the Trump tariffs, which, again, were just unilaterally and indiscriminately imposed against some countries that we actually have trade surpluses with, has to be rolled back.

There was an admission on Friday by the administration that their tariff policy has failed, and it is time for Congress to stand up and do its job to rebalance our economy.

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