Efforts to roll back President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs will face an uphill climb in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson is telling Republicans to stand firmly with Trump — even as markets tank and consumer prices are expected to soar.
But Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, is planning to introduce legislation to subject new tariffs to congressional review, a companion bill to a bipartisan effort on the Senate side. Bacon told NOTUS in a text message on Monday that he will be willing “at some point” to file a discharge petition to force a vote on the matter if needed, a maneuver to sidestep the speaker’s opposition.
“We think that it’s been abused,” Bacon said of the emergency powers Trump used to implement his tariffs.
If a handful of Republicans join all House Democrats to back a potential discharge petition, it would succeed. The process takes time, however: Lawmakers can only begin collecting signatures for a discharge petition after 30 legislative days have passed since a given bill was referred to the committee of jurisdiction.
And Johnson would likely push back on any such effort.
During a call with Republican lawmakers on Sunday, Johnson said that Trump “delivered the greatest economy in the history of the world in his first term,” arguing the president deserves their trust, according to a source on the call.
The discharge petition timeline punts action into the summer at the earliest, assuming Johnson sticks to his opposition and House leaders mostly stick to their planned calendar.
Bacon, who represents a swing district, is one of the most outspoken House Republicans alarmed by Trump’s moves. But others are also distressed by the economic turmoil. One GOP source familiar with the talks told NOTUS on Monday that another group of House Republicans is considering a separate bill to roll back Trump’s tariffs.
Rep. French Hill of Arkansas, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, has expressed concerns publicly, saying over the weekend that “the strategy has to be right.”
“When you use an across-the-board approach, you get that uncertainty that my constituents are reflecting,” Hill said.
Any congressional action will likely be too slow for Wall Street.
“The quicker this issue is resolved, the better because some of the negative effects increase cumulatively over time and would be hard to reverse,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in a letter to shareholders. Investors and companies enjoyed Trump’s first-term tax cuts and deregulation, even if his tariffs on steel, aluminum and some Chinese products made them wince. But the trade barriers Trump imposed in his first term were nothing compared to the massive tariffs he announced last week for “Liberation Day.”
Global markets are convulsing.
Trump’s decision had roughly the same impact on stocks in its immediate aftermath as the onset of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. It hasn’t given investors any confidence that the administration can’t seem to make up its mind about whether these tariffs are intended to be a starting point for trade barrier negotiations with the world, or if they are supposed to be a long-term project to reshape the American economy. (Trump has leaned more toward the latter view, while also touting how many countries have sought to negotiate with him.)
Trump doesn’t sound poised to resolve the tariffs any time soon, absent action from Congress. He announced that he’ll slap even more tariffs on products from China, after Chinese officials responded to Trump’s tariffs with their own duties on American products.
Any country that retaliates against Trump’s tariffs, he wrote, “will be immediately met with new and substantially higher Tariffs.”
Trump also urged patience — and promised “GREATNESS will be the result!”
—
Haley Byrd Wilt and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.