Throughout the Trump administration, Sen. Pat Toomey has been a lonely voice in favor of broad free-trade policies and a sharp critic of President Trump’s restrictionist approach. The Pennsylvania Republican has warned that Trump is creating precedents for executive branch policymaking that will haunt the GOP and the country for years to come.
Toomey contended in an interview with the Washington Examiner that it is “too early to tell” whether Trump has shifted the Republican Party on trade. He argued that the president has obscured how far away his policies, such as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, are from free-trade orthodoxy. Trump, he noted, typically presents deals such as USMCA as modernizing existing trade agreements and frames the alternative as pulling out of those deals. People who accept this are fooling themselves, Toomey said.
“Pro-trade Republicans could choose to convince themselves that those are reasons to support things like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, even if it goes backward on things on trade,” Toomey told the Washington Examiner. “But I definitely don’t think Republicans have given up on their underlying support for free trade.”
Even if the GOP as a whole hasn’t abandoned free trade, Trump has added a huge caveat to that. His administration has added tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of imports from China. Steel now faces a 25% tariff and aluminum a 10% levy. The administration is moving forward with tariffs on $2.4 billion worth of French products.
Opposing these policies has made Toomey the odd man out on Capitol Hill, said Simon Lester, a trade policy expert for the free-market Cato Institute. Toomey and his staff are “principled free traders and very knowledgeable,” Lester said, but “most others seem pretty willing to give Trump what he wants on most trade issues.”
Toomey is one of the few Republicans opposing Trump on USMCA. In his view, the trade agreement the White House brokered in early December with Canada, Mexico, and House Democrats is marginally worse than the deal it would replace, the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement.
On the day House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the USMCA would get a House vote, likely ensuring the deal would become law, Toomey directed scorn at it as little more than NAFTA with a few minor modernizations. It adds several new restrictions on trade and a sunset clause that adds, rather than detracts, from long-term economic uncertainty.
“If people think that’s a huge improvement, then I guess they’ll be happy with it. For people who think free trade is important, they’ll presumably see it as the step backward that I do,” the senator told reporters.
Trump himself has expressed exasperation at Toomey. “So what does Pat Toomey want me to do? Does he want me to say, ‘Let me put my hands up China, continue to rip us off?'” the president told Fox News in a September radio interview.
Toomey has attempted to build a bipartisan coalition against Trump, which in theory ought to be doable, given the GOP’s historical support for free trade and the Democrat’s opposition to the president.
But Democrats, though loathe to admit it, are quietly supportive of the president on trade, Toomey asserted. They are generally skeptical of trade deals, and the main criticism of Trump’s trade policies is that he hasn’t gone far enough to crack down on corporations. Democrats held up USMCA for months to get harsher labor rights protection language.
“The Democrats will often complain that this president has overstepped his bounds, but most Democrats are quiet on this stuff because they like the outcomes and how they can be used for their protectionist tendencies,” Toomey said.
Toomey says Trump’s trade policies are also shifting the way Democrats view executive power. He cited as examples the president’s use of national security as a rationale to unilaterally impose tariffs on steel and his threat to place tariffs on Mexico to force it to limit immigration. Several Democratic presidential candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have proposed “outrageous policies” that would use emergency declarations and executive orders similar to those Trump has employed, he argued.
One reason why free traders like him have struggled, Toomey argued, is that the president has an opponent that represents a particular case: China. Beijing’s predatory trade practices, such as theft of intellectual property and forced technology transfers, cannot be ignored.
“While I would have preferred different tactics, I recognize that Beijing’s policies needed to be addressed, so I give the president credit for addressing these behaviors,” Toomey said. As painful as the China tariffs might be, he says, they may nevertheless be necessary, at least for the short-term.
But other administration policies he wants to head off. Toomey has sponsored legislation, dubbed the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act, to rein in the executive branch’s ability to unilaterally impose tariffs under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, that Trump used to justify his unilateral steel and aluminum tariffs. Toomey would require congressional approval for such actions. The bill has strong bipartisan support but has yet to get a hearing.
Others who have expressed some concern over the president’s actions, such as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, have pushed for a compromise approach with Toomey. Grassley suggested putting a specific sunset on tariffs, but the chairman has yet to introduce legislation.
“We’re still working on this, still trying to build support,” Toomey said. “But it is hard moving any legislation in the Senate and this a controversial one.”
