President Trump’s tariff opponents on Capitol Hill are set to push back on multiple fronts this week as fears grow that a political landslide could be in the offing for the GOP if no change is made.
The pushback is likely to be felt from multiple directions, most notably from a bill that is gaining steam to reassert congressional authority and would give Congress the ability to veto presidential tariffs.
Trump’s trade representative is also set to receive a grilling on two hearings before lawmakers.
It’s unclear for now how much will extend beyond talk, with congressional leadership still loyal to the president. But Trump’s White House is nevertheless confronting a notable break from key corners of his party — especially plains-state Republicans who could see the effects of tariffs most sharply.
The most prominent effort is a bill to rein in Trump that would require presidential tariffs to be approved by Congress or they will expire in 60 days.
The legislation is being championed by Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska, among other key Republicans, such as Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Chuck Grassley of Iowa on Capitol Hill in 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) ·Tom Williams via Getty Images
“If we continue to see the stock market go a certain direction or if we see inflation or unemployment shift in a bad way,” Bacon said Sunday in a television appearance on CBS, “I think then this bill becomes a very viable bill.”
The effort, according to Bacon, is set to be joined by more House supporters to be unveiled today.
But GOP leadership could stall or kill the effort entirely from even receiving a vote, with House Speaker Mike Johnson offering a message in a private call with his colleagues over the weekend that they should stick with the president, according to multiple reports Sunday.
And even amid the continued historic market sell-off, Trump remains publicly unmoved. He said Sunday night that markets may have to “take medicine” with additional comments Monday morning where he again pushed the Fed to lower rates and also coined a new term urging his GOP colleagues to “not be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!).”
Also this week, a top Trump trade official is likely to receive a public earful, with US trade representative Jamieson Greer set to appear before lawmakers first on Tuesday before the Senate Finance Committee and then again Wednesday before the House Ways and Means Committee.
Greer’s first appointment on Tuesday will see him face questions from Grassley — the second-ranking Republican on the committee and a co-sponsor of the bill to reign in the president’s authority — as well as others like Ron Wyden of Oregon who is the top-ranking Democrat and has already called Trump’s tariff move “economic poison.”
This week’s moves also come after four Senate Republicans joined with Democrats last week to adopt a resolution aimed at nullifying the national emergency Trump declared last month to implement 25% tariffs on Canada.
The velocity of the pushback to come this week from GOP lawmakers will clearly depend on how much worse things get economically. But many Republicans are now openly talking about how bad things could get for them politically if things continue to go south economically.
And those stakes are clear, with Goldman Sachs economists releasing a new note over the weekend that halved their 2025 Q4-to-Q4 GDP growth forecast and raised the 12-month recession probability to 45%.
“Tariffs have also led to political decimation,” GOP Sen. Rand Paul — a longtime tariff critic in the party — told reporters recently, describing two historic tariff moves where “in 1890, they lost 50% of their seats [and] in the early 1930s, we lost the House and Senate for 60 years.”
“If he leaves them in place and we just have constant tariffs, that is a massive tax increase on the American people,” added GOP Senator Ted Cruz in multiple comments on his podcast, adding that a recession could lead to a “2026 [midterms that] in all likelihood politically would be a bloodbath.”
Read more: What Trump’s tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet
The top-down power structure of Congress could limit the ability of these lawmakers to slow Trump, with even Bacon admitting his bill “will be harder to pass this in the House.”
But it’s a chorus that could continue to grow if markets continue to wipe out trillions of dollars in investor value and it becomes clear that GOP lawmakers may need to distance themselves from Trump.
And Trump has outwardly remained defiant and dismissive of questions even as the market has fallen.
Returning Sunday from Florida, the president denied that he had engineered the market drop on purpose, saying, “I don’t want anything to go down but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
“What’s going to happen to the markets, I can’t tell you,” the president added in the back-and-forth where he repeatedly stood by the tariffs and said they were a key reason he was elected.
His aides, meanwhile, have echoed the president and even at times turned to stock market cheerleaders.
“You can’t lose money unless you sell,” said White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro counseled on Fox News this weekend saying a boom is coming, and he even predicted “we will hit 50,000 on the Dow easily by the end of this term.”
This post has been updated with additional developments.
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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