Last week, Politico reported that some top Republicans are pushing to reassert Congress’ power over tariffs as the trade war escalates. They’ve introduced a bill that would force Trump to give Congress 48 hours’ notice before imposing tariffs and to get congressional approval 60 days before tariffs could kick in. That could help companies avoid experiencing whiplash but wouldn’t necessarily change the trade policy. And lawmakers may entertain the bill, since the CTA warned that Republicans may lose voters if they don’t intervene.
“Make no mistake: American consumers, families, and workers will feel real pain, and elected policymakers in Washington will be held accountable by voters,” Shapiro said.
However, “it’s highly unlikely this proposal will ever become law,” Politico noted, as the majority of Republicans who control both chambers appear unlikely to support it.
In the meantime, Trump’s use of tariffs as a weapon could stoke never-before-seen retaliations from China, the CTA’s VP of International Trade, Ed Brzytwa, told Ars last year. That could include retaliation outside the economic arena, Brzytwa said, if China runs out of ways to strike back to hurt the US’s bottomline.
Panicked by the trade war, many Americans are rushing to make big-ticket purchases before prices shift, Fortune reported, perhaps hurting future demand for tech companies’ products.
For tech companies like Apple—which promised to invest $500 billion in the US, likely to secure tariff exemptions—Trump’s trade war threatens long-term supply chain disruptions, spiked costs, and unhappy customers potentially suddenly unable to afford even their latest devices. (Elsewhere, Switch 2 fans were recently dismayed when tariffs delayed deliveries of their preorders.)
And it kind of goes without saying that Trump’s long-term plan to push investments and supply chains into the US needs more than weeks to fulfill. Even if all companies strove to quickly move manufacturing into the US and blocked all imports from China within the next decade, Lovely told Ars last year, “we would still have a lot of imports from China because Chinese value added is going to be embedded in things we import from Vietnam and Thailand and Indonesia and Mexico.”
Ultimately, the US may never be able to push China out of global markets, and even coming close would likely require coordination across several presidential terms, Lovely suggested.
“The tariffs can be effective in changing these direct imports, as we’ve seen, yeah, but they’re not going to really push China out of the global economy,” Lovely told Ars.
