Rachel Maddow on Wednesday called on Congress to curtail Donald Trump’s ability to institute tariffs, hours after his announcement of shockingly high percentages on some countries sent markets into a tailspin.
The MSNBC anchor, after joining in on the the widespread mockery of Trump for putting tariffs on uninhabited islands, got serious.
Trump, she said, is “purposefully crater[ing] the U.S. economy, and threatens to throw the entire world into a pointless trade war-fueled recession, if not depression.”
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Congress must therefore act, she urged.
“The actual way to stop this dictatorship mid-catastrophe, the way to stop this part of Trump’s one-man wrecking-ball operation against the U.S. economy is for Congress to do something very simple, for Congress to simply declare with a simple majority vote that actually there isn’t an emergency,” she said, alluding to how Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 while announcing tariffs.
“Yes, Trump proclaimed an economic emergency. That’s how he gave himself these emergency powers,” Maddow explained. “But Congress could simply just say, ‘Actually, no, there isn’t an economic emergency. So no, he no longer has these powers. He is no longer empowered to singlehandedly drunk-drive our country into this particular wall.’ They could do that.”
Maddow then praised the Senate for doing just that Wednesday night when it passed a resolution rejecting the national emergency when it came to Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canada. GOP Sens. Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul spurned Trump and joined all Democrats to support the measure.
Maddow also seemed confident it would pass the House as well, and that Trump would then be prevented from “bludgeoning” the economy—assuming it came up for a vote.
The problem, she explained, is that House Speaker Mike Johnson did something “bizarre”: moving to prevent a floor vote to end the national emergencies that Trump depends on.
“In other words, there is a cure to this disease. There is a readily available, dramatically effective, proven legal antidote to this poison, and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson grabbed it out of our hands and flushed it down the toilet to make sure we can never take it, so Donald Trump can keep doing this to the economy,” Maddow said. “Are you tired of all the winning?”
Unless or until Republicans convince Johnson to change his mind, Maddow warned, “It’s Trump and House Republicans standing together to throw us all off the cliff.”
