During Thursday's town hall, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) answered questions about Trump's tariffs.
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00:00Clifton Bethune from Manning, South Carolina.
00:06There's Brother Bethune over there.
00:22Good evening, everybody.
00:26Well, my question has two parts.
00:30Part number one, my sister-in-law just spoke about it, and that was the tariff.
00:37Brother Bethune, I'm going to ask you to pause just for a minute for me.
00:42We are allowing the Congressman to converse just for a second.
00:46It's good? Okay. Very good. I'm sorry.
00:48Please continue.
00:49Okay. My sister-in-law asked a question about the tariff.
00:53Now, the way I thought tariff went was they were imposed by Congress.
01:00So when is Congress going to stop letting the administration use a unilateral avenue of instituting tariffs for the United States?
01:16My original question was about 95, but I think the tariff issue is much, much larger.
01:24And how can the Congress stop this tariff thing?
01:31Because I thought all tariff would be introduced and levied by the Congress.
01:37That was traditionally true, but the Congress gave the president, not this president, but gave presidents that authority to demonstrate some emergency and initiate tariffs.
02:02Congress, and that's what has happened here, and for Congress to stop that, there's going to have to be 218 votes.
02:13Us Democrats have got 213, which means five votes got to come from the other side in order to stop that.
02:24And to this day, there aren't five votes on the other side.
02:28That's in the House.
02:33Of course, we don't have but 48 in the Senate.
02:40And for any bill to get to the floor, you need 60.
02:45So we're 12 votes short on bringing it to the floor, though you don't need but 51 for the bill to pass.
02:52The Republicans to break a filibuster requires 60 votes, and right now the Republicans are filibustering on these issues.
03:03And until we get the numbers, you're not going to stop it unless his numbers keep falling.
03:14And that's why you have to express yourself.
03:19That's why you have to speak out and really make this administration aware of the fact that they are really committing a big error.
03:38That's the only thing to do, we don't have the votes, and you've got to vote for people who are going to do something about it.