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Excerpt:Despite last-minute pressure from President Donald Trump, four Senate Republicans on Wednesday bucked demands to back his plan for sharp new tariffs on Canada, a slap in the face that he has promised not to forget.
A midnight missive by President Trump early Wednesday morning wasn’t enough to prevent the four Republicans from joining with unanimous Democratic support to pass a resolution denouncing President Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Of the four — Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Rand Paul (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — only Collins is up for reelection next year while McConnell has announced his intent to retire.
Trump previously implored the four holdouts to “get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.”
In a fiery floor speech on Wednesday, Sen. Paul accused Trump of placing a tax hike on the American people by leveeing his new tariffs.
“This is a tax, plain and simple,” he said of Trump’s Canada tariffs. “Taxes should not be enacted by one person. So I will vote today to end the emergency. I will vote today to try to reclaim the power of taxation, the power of the tariff, to where the Constitution designated it should properly be, and that is in Congress.”
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