TERMINATING THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED TO IMPOSE DUTIES ON ARTICLES IMPORTED FROM CANADA

On 2025-04-02, Senator Mark R. Warner (D-VA) delivered a floor speech titled "TERMINATING THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED TO IMPOSE DUTIES ON ARTICLES IMPORTED FROM CANADA" in the Senate.

TERMINATING THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED TO IMPOSE DUTIES ON ARTICLES IMPORTED FROM CANADA

Congressional Record, Volume 171 Issue 59 (Wednesday, April 2, 2025) [Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 59 (Wednesday, April 2, 2025)] [Senate] [Pages S2121-S2137] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] TERMINATING THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED TO IMPOSE DUTIES ON ARTICLES IMPORTED FROM CANADA The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Committee on Finance is discharged from further consideration of S.J. Res. 37, which the clerk will report. The legislative clerk read as follows: A joint resolution (S.J. Res. 37) terminating the national emergency declared to impose duties on articles imported from Canada. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there is now 6 hours of debate, equally divided, on the joint resolution. The Senator from Kentucky. S.J. Res. 37 Mr. PAUL. ``Taxation without representation is tyranny,'' bellowed James Otis in the days and weeks and years leading up to the American Revolution. This became the rallying cry of American patriots: No taxation without representation. The American Patriots thought that a distant Parliament in England where they had no representation had no right to tax them. This was the rallying cry: ``No taxation without representation.'' Our Founding Fathers believed so strongly in this, they embodied it in our Constitution. Our Constitution doesn't allow any one man or woman to raise taxes. It must be the body of Congress. Now, this wasn't new. This was part of maybe a thousand-year tradition from Magna Carta on. In Magna Carta, it is stated: No taxation without the common counsel of the realm. Even at that time they were chafing at one man, the King, determining the taxes for the land. One hundred years before our Revolutionary War, in the English Civil War, there was a debate over parliamentary supremacy versus supremacy of the King. They did not want to pay taxes that weren't approved by the Parliament. In 1683, the New York Charter on Liberties, the beginning charter for the colony of New York stated: No taxation without representation. And after this English Civil War, the English Bill of Rights embodied: No taxation without the consent of Parliament. This principle was longstanding. It was nonnegotiable. This was what sparked the Revolution. And, yet, today we are here before the Senate because one person in our country wishes to raise taxes. Well, this is contrary to everything our country was founded upon. One person is not allowed to raise taxes. The Constitution forbids it. The Constitution was so concerned with the power of taxes--which some have said the power of taxes is the power to destroy--but our Founding Fathers were so concerned with this, that they said: No, the President will not have the power to legislate. The President will not have the power to tax. Only Congress will be able to tax the people and only by originating tax bills in the House. It was that specific. They were so mortified. They were so worried by having a monarchy. They were so worried about having all the power gravitate to the Executive, that they said: We must split the power. They based a lot of their thinking on Montesquieu. Montesquieu wrote in the 1740s--40, 50 years before our Constitution. Montesquieu wrote that when the legislative and executive powers are united in one, there can be no liberty. This is something that our Founding Fathers took to heart. They said: We must separate the powers. We must, at all cost, limit the power of the Presidency. This isn't about political party. I voted for and supported President Trump, but I don't support the rule of one person. We are set--the President is set--to have a 25-percent tax on goods coming from Canada and Mexico. This is a tax--plain and simple--on the American people. But one person can't do that. Our Founding Fathers said: No, that would be illegal for one person to raise taxes. It has to come to Congress. It has to originate in the House. This has gone on for 200- and-some-odd years. You can't simply declare an emergency and say: Well, the constitutional Republic was great, but, gosh, we have got an emergency. The times are dire. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said: There are no exemptions for emergency. There was no exemption for a pandemic. There was no exemption for emergencies. The taxation clause stands. It is an important part of the Constitution: Taxes must originate in the House. They must be voted on in Congress. No one man can raise taxes on the people. They are set to do this through a process in which an emergency has been declared. But realize this: One person declares an emergency, the President. And even if we are successful, which I think we will be successful here today--a majority will vote to say: This is wrong- headed, and the emergency should end. It would have to go to the House. But even if we were successful in the House, the President would veto it. It would take a two-thirds vote in order to stop an emergency. That is such a burden that we need to consider reforming the emergency powers and reversing this. I think a President can have times that there are emergencies and the President can declare an emergency. But it should last 30 day, at most. At the end of 30 days, the emergency would be brought to the people's House--the House of Representatives and the Senate--and we would vote to affirm or uphold the emergency. Right now, the pretense of this emergency is fentanyl. I don't discount fentanyl. I know families who have lost kids to fentanyl. But there is more fentanyl going from the United States into Canada than there is from Canada going into the United States. There is no emergency. The Canadians have actually been cooperative with us and said they will try to do even more. The problem isn't in Canada. Even if the problem is valid, even if that is something that we all agree on, [[Page S2122]] you can't have a country ruled by emergency. You can't have a country without a separation of powers, without checks and balances. Madison put it this way. Madison said that we would pit ambition against ambition; that all men--and, frankly, all women--are motivated by self-interest and the self-accumulation or aggrandizement of power; and so we would limit their power by pitting ambition against ambition. We would give some of the power to the House, some to the Senate, and some to the President. There would be checks and balances in a jostling of power, but we would check and balance each other. Part of the problem we face today with this emergency, though, is that Congress has abdicated their power--not just recently, not just for this President. This is a bipartisan problem. I am a Republican. I am a supporter of Donald Trump. But this is a bipartisan problem. I don't care if the President is a Republican or a Democrat. I don't want to live under emergency rule. I don't want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me and have a check and balance on power. One person can make a mistake. And guess what: Tariffs are a terrible mistake. They don't work. They will lead to higher prices. They are a tax, and they have historically been bad for our economy. But even if this were something that was magic, and there was going to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I wouldn't want to live under emergency rule. I would want to live in a constitutional republic where there are checks and balances against the excesses of both sides, right or left. If one person rules, that person could make a horrible mistake. On things so important as war, it is the same thing. We don't want a President just to go to war because a President might get angry with some country or have a vendetta. We are supposed to vote. That is why there is a declaration of war. War originates also in Congress. But we have lost so many of these things and so much of this. It is Congress's fault for giving it. Over the last 70 years, there are probably a dozen pieces of legislation where Congress said to the President: Here, take this power. Create emergencies. Put on tariffs. Negotiate for us because we are too feeble-minded to do it ourselves. But the thing is, the Constitution doesn't let us give our power away. There is something called the nondelegation clause, and it says that we are not allowed to give power away. We can't just say: Here, Mr. President, take it. In this particular case, it is even worse. The rule of law--IEEPA is the acronym for it--has never been used for tariffs before and doesn't mention the word tariff. So this isn't something that was targeted in times of need: The President can have the power to put on tariffs. It never says that. This will be an extraordinary use of something never intended to be a way to have--unilateral--one single person invoke a tax on the people. With regard to tariffs, let's be very clear. Tariffs are simply taxes. 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 prescription drugs. Every dollar collected in tariff revenue comes straight out of the pockets of American consumers. Conservatives used to understand that tariffs are taxes on the American people. Conservatives used to be uniformly opposed to raising taxes because we wanted the private marketplace, the private individuals to keep more of their incomes. So we were always for lower taxes. And yet now the mantra that is coming is: We want higher taxes. What happened? Did we, all of a sudden, give up all of the things we used to believe in as conservatives? I, for one, haven't. I still think more taxes is bad for the economy. More money taken out of the productive sector, the private sector, given to the government is a mistake. To those who still call themselves conservatives but now support tariffs, let me remind them that Milton Friedman said tariffs ``raise prices to consumers and waste our resourc

Referenced legislation: SJRES37, SJRES37, S959