— Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY)
There was an old-fashioned conservative principle that believed that less taxes were better than more taxes; that if you taxed something, you got less of it, so that if you place a new tax on trade, you will get less trade.
There was also this idea that you didn’t do taxation without representation. That idea goes not only back to our American Revolution, it goes back to the English civil war as well.
It goes back to probably Magna Carta. I mean, for hundreds of years the English were arguing of the supremacy of Parliament, that Parliament would be able to have the power over the King. So when we were leading up to the Revolution, the cry from James Otis was, ``Taxation without representation is tyranny.‘’
These were the words of James Otis, but they still ring true today. It should not come as a surprise that in a country founded on a tax revolt, one person is not allowed to raise taxes. Our Founding Fathers saw this and said: No, we want to make sure that the authority of taxation begins not only in Congress, that it actually originates in the House, the body closest to the people.
Our Constitution forbids taxes from being enacted without the approval of Congress, and yet here we are.
An emergency has been declared, as the Senator from Virginia remarked, everywhere. There is an emergency everywhere. Sounds like an emergency everywhere is really an emergency nowhere. But despite the constitutional restraints or constraints on executive power, Americans have now been ordered to pay higher taxes in the form of tariffs but without the consent of Congress.
The tariffs we discuss today are global tariffs. Just about every country in the world is subjected to at least a 10-percent tariff, to say nothing of the dozens of countries whose imports will be taxed at a much higher rate.
Congress didn’t debate these tariffs. Congress didn’t vote to enact these tariffs. The tariffs are simply imposed by Presidential fiat, by proclamation.
Government by one person who assumes all power by asserting a so-called emergency is the antithesis of constitutional government. It was Montesquieu that our Founding Fathers looked to in setting up the separation of powers.
And Montesquieu said that when you unite the legislative power with the executive power in the body of one person, that no liberty can exist. They worried about this. They fretted about it. They worried about having too much power with the President, and so they severely constricted the power of the Presidency. They said the President couldn’t take us to war; only Congress could. They said the President couldn’t spend money; only Congress could. They said the President couldn’t tax people; only Congress could.
These were the very bedrock and still are the very bedrock of our constitutional principles. Yet, people--particularly on my side--are looking away and saying: Oh, whatever. We will just let the President do whatever.
Look, I supported President Trump. I still support President Trump on many things. But I am not for a country run by emergencies. Even if the person was doing what I wanted and was, you know, making every day my birthday, I would not be for that unless we deliberated upon that. There are constitutional processes that are incredibly important.
The Constitution doesn’t allow the President of the United States to be the sole decider. Even the President must abide by the proper limits of Executive power.
Thankfully, our Constitution does more than merely hope that our Chief Executive will remain within the confines of the Constitution; our Constitution explicitly limits the power of the Presidency. Our Founders led a rebellion against a King precisely over this. They went to great lengths to circumscribe and limit the power of the Presidency.
Devoted as they were to the preservation of individual liberty, the Founders divided power among three branches of government. But more importantly, those three branches were to check and balance each other to prevent one branch from accumulating too much power.
Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that the Constitution was to pit ambition against ambition. The natural ambition of men and women to accumulate power was to be checked by other branches of people who would say: You can’t have that power. It is our power.
That pitting of ambition back and forth was to constrain government. It was to constrain government from running away and power from being run away with one person.
The Founding Fathers empowered Congress with tools to ensure that the liberties of the people would not be threatened by one-person rule. The Founders would not be surprised that the Executive would attempt to aggrandize power at the expense of the legislature. They would have expected it. Indeed, they did expect it. But they would be surprised--the Founders would be shocked that Congress would voluntarily and recklessly and fecklessly give up their power to the Presidency, to submit to emergency rule. The Founders would not have expected the House of Representatives to become so craven as to refuse to even allow a vote on ending the emergency.
The law says that the vote we will have is mandatory. It is privileged. The Senate will adhere to the law.
The House will not have a vote. The House, in its haste to give away its power to tax, actually passed a rule to prevent a mandatory vote on ending the emergencies. They prevent it because the rule says that days no longer exist. They declared that legislative days will not exist despite the legislature continuing to meet each day.
The House has essentially ruled that days are not days and they are not to be counted as days until such time as the House again agrees to allow days to be counted as days. Does that sound absurd? Absolutely. It is absurd. It is craven. It is cowardice at its best, and it is dishonest because a rule of the House is preventing a law from being obeyed. I didn’t know we could pass a rule to prevent a law from being obeyed.
When the emergency powers were granted to the President in 1966, the Emergencies Act was meant to constrain the Republic. We were already worried about too many emergencies. Many on my side have actually cosponsored bills that say emergencies should automatically end unless affirmatively approved by Congress. Many of those people now are looking the other way. They are looking the other way and saying: Well, it is our President now.
I had a reform of the Emergencies Act under the previous President, a Democrat. I had the same bill under a Republican. This should not be a partisan issue.
The Founders would not have expected the upper chamber, the Senate, to let the novel use of a statute traditionally used to sanction adversaries to become used for tariffs to tax American people and to let it go unchallenged. This is not constitutionalism; this is cowardice.
Our system of government cannot work when Congress abdicates its legislative authority. Madison said we would pit ambition against ambition, but what if we have Presidential ambition and we have congressional acquiescence? we have congressional timidity? we have congressional nonentity, choosing to become a nonentity, not participate, do whatever you want? It is a recipe for disaster. Madison and those of the revolutionary generation would have expected Members of Congress to jealously guard their authority from the imperial pretensions of the Chief Executive.
To endorse governance by emergency rule is to fail to live up to what the Constitution demands of us, and failure to do our constitutional duty is an invitation to further emergency rule.
I know some Republicans like the idea of taxing trade, but what if there is a next President who is a Democrat who says: By emergency rule, I decree there will be no gasoline-using cars. We will have only electric cars.
That is what we are preparing ourselves for. Every distortion of the checks and balances of powers gets worse. Every time a party changes hands, they say: Well, you guys did this, so we are going to leapfrog and do this. And it goes back and forth until the individual citizen knows nothing other than the loss of liberty.
Even President Trump didn’t try to argue that this law called IEEPA, which is normally used for sanctions--he didn’t act upon it in his first term. He makes a claim today, though, likely because the appropriate trade laws on the books require months to be implemented, and he can’t wait. And the Republicans go along, and they say: Emergency? No problem. Constitution? What? Constitution? Forget about it.
Members of his political party will stand by his assertion. Some may cast their actions today as an exercise of party loyalty. Some may even be praised by Pennsylvania Avenue. But for those who care to listen closely, within that praise will be heard a touch of disdain.
It is no secret that Congress lacks the fortitude to stand up for its prerogatives, and this is bipartisan. Presidents in both parties routinely exceed their power because they know that Congress has weakened itself to such an extent that it cannot challenge and will not challenge Executive overreach.
Congress delegates its legislative authority to the President so that the laws we live under are, in reality, written by bureaucrats who the people do not know, will never meet, and cannot hold accountable through elections.
But I don’t want to let off both parties on this. The powers that have been given to the President over trade have been given to the President by Congress over many decades. Congress acquiesced. Congress said: Here. We don’t want to deal with it. You can have it.
Congress today can scarcely be bothered to even consider individual appropriations bills. By consistently waiting until the last second to pass a massive funding bill and threaten a government shutdown, the leadership deprives Congress of what Madison called its most complete and effectual weapon: the power of the purse.
We just put it all in one bill, and then they say: If you don’t for it, you are for shutting the government down.
You can’t shut the government down, so you have to vote for the massive bill, which includes more pork than you can probably ever imagine.
Congress has--unique among the three branches--unilaterally disarmed and demonstrated itself unable and unwilling to check the Executive.
If Americans are to live under this emergency rule, it will not be because the President sought too much power; it will be because Congress let it happen.
If Americans are to live in a country where the President alone decides what is to be taxed, at what rate, and for how long, it will be because Congress is too feeble to stand up for the interests and bank accounts of the people.
If Americans live in a country where their elected representatives in the legislature cannot or will not speak for them, it will be because those representatives silenced themselves. They gave in. They did not stand up and do their duty.
We can show the people that the constitutional principle of the separation of powers still means something and that we can successfully challenge the Presidential attempt to raise taxes without the consent of Congress.
Tariffs are taxes, plain and simple. Tariffs don’t punish foreign governments; they punish American families. When we tax imports, we raise the price of everything from groceries, to smartphones, to washing machines, to just about every conceivable product.
Voters in the last election indicated they were fed up with high prices. Every time Americans went to the grocery store, they were reminded that inflation and putting food on their family’s table was more difficult and left them with less money for other necessities.
Many pundits say the 2024 election hinged on promises to reduce inflation and lower taxes. Does it make any sense to impose a tax on imports that will make all Americans worse off? Shouldn’t we learn from our success?
We should ask ourselves a fundamental question: Is trade good? Well, trade is simply capitalism. Trade never occurs unless you want a product more than you want your money. Has anyone ever made a trade, a voluntary trade, where you thought you were being ripped off? No. You buy stuff only because you think you are making a good deal.
Those who say that, oh, no, we are being ripped off--it is a fallacy. It asserts that one of the parties must necessarily lose or be taken advantage of. The argument belies a fundamental misunderstanding of trade. By definition, every voluntary trade is mutually beneficial.
Trade is good. That isn’t an opinion; it is a fact. For at least the last 50 years, as trade rises, so does wealth. And people say the middle class has gotten smaller? Slightly but only because it moved to the upper class.
These tariffs will make Americans poorer, and they will make the defenders of those tariffs pay. Tariffs bring us closer to the day when the people are ruled by a czar of industrial policy. When that day comes, we will wish we had defended the Constitution when we still had the power to do so.
We cannot afford to stand idly by while the constitutional principle of the separation of powers is eviscerated. Legislators who stand aside and abdicate the power to tax will one day rue the accumulation of power in the office of one person.
I stand against this emergency, I stand against these tariffs, and I stand against shredding the Constitution.
I have no animus towards the President. I voted for him and support his administration.
I come to the floor today not because I want to but because I am compelled to. I love my country and the principles upon which it is founded. The oath I took upon taking this office is to the Constitution of the United States and not to any person or faction.
I want to preserve the divisions of power that protect us and our children from the rule of one person. That is why I will today vote to end this emergency. I will vote to reclaim the taxation power of Congress, where the Constitution properly places it, and I urge the Members of my party to do the same.
