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3 cheers for the anti-tariff House Republicans

Here are three cheers for the six House Republicans who voted with nearly all Democrats to repeal President Trump’s tariffs against Canada. They bucked their party and their leadership, and especially Trump, to do the right thing.

The shame isn’t that the six voted with Democrats, but that no other Republicans joined them. 

The six Republicans — Reps. Don Bacon  (Neb.), Kevin Kiley (Calif.), Thomas Massie  (Ky.), Jeff Hurd (Colo.), Brian Fitzpatrick  (Pa.) and Dan Newhouse  (Wash.)  — get their first cheer for reasserting the Constitution’s provision that the power to impose taxes belongs to Congress. According to Article 1, Section 8, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” 

I say “reassert” because members of Congress from both parties have gradually ceded much of their constitutional responsibility to the president or bureaucrats.

Tariffs are taxes, and it is Congress’s role to impose or remove them. The six stressed that responsibility as one of the reasons for their vote. For example, Massie explained, “My goal is to defend the Constitution and to represent the people. Taxing authority is vested in the House of Representatives, not the Executive.” 

To be sure, Congress has passed legislation giving the president authority to impose tariffs for a limited time and for a specific national-security reason. Congress has never given the president the authority to impose tariffs for any reason or for no reason — and certainly not because a foreign leader “rubbed me the wrong way.”

Republicans aggressively defended their constitutional “power of the purse” when President Joe Biden tried to spend more than $400 billion forgiving student loan debt but have mostly remained quiet under Trump. 

The six Republicans get a second cheer because they know Trump’s claim that foreign countries pay the tariffs is false. Amazingly, almost every Republican — not to mention most economists — also know that claim is false.  

On Jan. 30, Trump wrote in the Wall Street Journal that criticisms that “tariffs are nothing but a ‘tax’ on consumers … has been proved totally false.” Trump claims a new Harvard Business School study shows his tariffs’ impact “has fallen overwhelming on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S.” 

Assessing the impact of tariffs is very complicated. There are hundreds of thousands of imported goods from dozens of countries all with different tariff rates — rates that Trump can and does change frequently. Then U.S. businesses determine whether to eat part or all those tariffs or pass them on to consumers. But here’s the direct quote from Harvard’s “Tariff Tracker” study Trump mentioned, “Assuming full pass-through at the border and a 50 percent import cost share at the retail level, our results suggest that U.S. consumers paid up to 43 percent of the tariff burden, with the rest absorbed by U.S. firms.” 

Several other studies have come to a similar conclusion. The Congressional Budget Office’s new study says, “U.S. businesses will absorb 30 percent of the import price increases by reducing their profit margins; the remaining 70 percent will be passed through to consumers by raising prices.” 

And there’s the new report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Reuters explains, “The paper said that between January and August of last year Americans took 94 percent of the hit from Trump’s tariffs. During September and October, that ebbed to 92 percent, settling to 86 percent in November.” There are many more studies, such as the Kiel Institute.

But that’s not all. Ford Motor Co. just announced it had to spend an extra $900 million on tariffs, bringing its total 2025 tariff bill to $2 billion. And the company expects to pay the government another $2 billion in tariffs this year.

Did Ford’s financial officers pay that money to the U.S. government by mistake? When U.S. Customs demanded the tariff should Ford have responded that Trump said other countries would be paying it?

In addition, more than 1,000 companies are suing the government over Trump’s tariffs. According to Bloomberg, “hundreds of companies already are lined up hoping to recoup their share of the billions of dollars in duties paid so far.” Apparently, these companies think they paid the tariffs, not other countries.  

At least these companies are willing to buck the Trump administration and face his wrath, which is why the six Republicans get their third cheer: They have the courage to challenge Trump when he is clearly wrong.  

Disagreeing with Trump is politically perilous. He will demean and deride a dissenter and may decide to back a primary challenger, even if that means losing the seat to a Democrat. It is politically commendable that six Republicans were willing to run the Trump gauntlet or retire.

As we head to the midterm elections, Republican incumbents will be running political ads claiming they have the courage to stand up to liberal Democrats. The real question is whether they have the courage to stand up to Trump when he’s wrong.

Merrill Matthews is the Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy. 

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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