During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) spoke about President Trump invoking emergency powers to impose blanket tariffs.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador, for being with us today.
00:05Tax day came early this year, came on April 2nd, since Trump's sweeping tariffs are raising prices for American families by $4,600 this year, according to the latest estimates.
00:18It keeps going up. Families are struggling. Businesses are panicking.
00:22I talked to a business in my district that talked about being tariffed out of business.
00:27We have businesses who have a lot of export, who manufacture right here in the U.S. and export, who are losing business.
00:36Even Republicans are beginning to break with the president.
00:39We've seen several joint bills that would make clear that the president does not have the ability to single-handedly impose sweeping tariffs.
00:49The real question we're all wondering is how do we get out of this mess that Trump has created?
00:55Chairman Smith recently said he hopes that the Trump tariffs will give USTR leverage to negotiate new trade deals.
01:04But, Ambassador, how can any country trust the U.S. enough to make a trade deal?
01:10Given that Trump has thrown out existing trade deals, like Australia or South Korea, or even USMCA, which he negotiated and Congress enacted,
01:22how are people going to trust us when arbitrarily these deals are being thrown out?
01:28Congresswoman, thank you.
01:30The United States remains the consumer market of choice for everybody.
01:33And I hear some of these Wall Street analysts, you know, predicting, you know, imminent catastrophe.
01:41And that's just, when we look back at Trump, at Trump won, we put tariffs on China and we reinvigorated NAFTA to be USMCA.
01:49You know, we saw real household medium income go up.
01:52We saw inflation go down, unemployment go down.
01:54And the countries are coming to us every day.
01:57We're having several meetings with them every day to do these deals.
01:59So they're not showing hesitance, it's quite the opposite.
02:01But if we have a deal that's being blown up, then you can say you're negotiating a deal.
02:05Two seconds later, you can throw it out.
02:07What kind of deal is that?
02:09Are these deals that you're supposedly negotiating?
02:11Are they going to come to Congress for a vote like USMCA did?
02:16These are deals.
02:18So, first of all, if we did a comprehensive free trade agreement, of course, we would come to Congress, et cetera.
02:22And we will certainly keep Congress up to speed on any kind of thing.
02:25Any deal that you do, are you going to bring that to Congress for a vote?
02:28We'll do what the law requires, some of it's consultation, some requires a vote.
02:32So we'll follow the law on that front.
02:34But the countries are coming, right?
02:36If they were hesitant, they wouldn't be knocking down our door.
02:38But I don't understand what the countries are coming to do.
02:41You put tariffs in place, sweeping tariffs with no specifics in terms of what the goals are, no plans.
02:48And then you say countries are coming to what?
02:50To individually negotiate with President Trump and it's his whim, what's acceptable or not acceptable?
02:56So, for example, I get a letter from the Vietnamese, which I received recently,
03:00and it outlined a number of tariff lines where they want to reduce their tariffs
03:03and non-tariff barriers that they want to remove and they want to engage with us on reciprocal trade.
03:08But what are the objectives of the negotiation?
03:11You didn't lay those out.
03:12The plan, there's no plan that was laid out by the president.
03:15I've seen no plan from USTR on what the goal of the tariffs are.
03:20We're damaging companies.
03:22We've thrown out existing trade deals that we already have.
03:25And now you say there's a negotiation with no clear goal what that negotiation is
03:30or whether or not Congress is going to have a vote on a potential deal?
03:36So we have a 20-page order laying out the basis for the order and the emergency we're facing,
03:40which is the trade deficit that President Biden left us with, the offshoring that it represents,
03:44the non-tariff barriers that it represents, and we're looking to eliminate that.
03:48And a tariff is a way to do that.
03:50And if a country has an alternative method that they think will help us meet those goals,
03:53we're happy to entertain that.
03:53Can we talk about the emergency powers of the emergency power statute that Trump invoked,
03:59IEPA, to impose his tariff?
04:01It states the president in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before exercising any powers.
04:10That didn't happen.
04:12Our staff came, our USTR staff came up to Congress and did consult.
04:16With who?
04:16With what members of Congress did you consult with?
04:21I'm a member of the Ways of Means Committee.
04:23I'm a member of the Trade Subcommittee.
04:25I called both the chairman and the ranking member the day before the morning of.
04:30So if you talked to, if you called to, how could you consult with folks when there wasn't even a deal that was proposed?
04:39In fact, it wasn't until April 2nd when the tariffs were put in place, no one even knew what exactly was going to happen.
04:45There was nothing to consult on.
04:47So how did that consultation take place?
04:50I had a phone call with Chairman Smith and ranking member Neal.
04:53About a non-existent deal.
04:55Well, I told them about the IEPA action that was coming, and I sent my staff up here to greet the committee staff as well.
05:00So I argue now we did not have that consultation.
05:05Here we are.
05:06There was no plan in place.
05:07There's no plan in place going forward.
05:11The American people are hurting, and now in the rule vote that we are going to have just after we are done with this hearing,
05:16Republicans are already putting in a provision to make sure that they don't have to vote on the tariffs that are in place.
05:25Congress should have a role here.
05:27It's terrible that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle aren't willing to have a vote, too.
05:31Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
05:32I yield back.