Grassley Says Section 232 Hearing Unlikely in November, No Plans to 'Unwind' Existing Tariffs
The Senate Finance Committee's attempt to give Congress more of a say on how Section 232 tariffs or quotas are applied is stalled again. Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, when he was speaking with reporters a week ago, said a markup of a bill along those lines could happen in November if he could find a compromise that could pass out of committee. The chairman's deadline for introducing a bill has slipped repeatedly through the year (see 1908070058 and 1906130033).
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Although most coverage of the Section 232 legislation has focused on the differences between Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Grassley told International Trade Today on Nov. 5 that it's the top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who is holding up introduction. "I have come to that conclusion that I’m going to have to let regular order in the committee go ahead, but there’s no sense of putting down a mark that doesn't have some hope of getting through the committee, no matter how bipartisan it is," he said. Regular order means there would be no compromise between the Portman and Toomey bills engineered by Grassley and put forward as the solution -- instead members could vote on a bill with whatever elements they coalesce around. "Wyden wanted some more time, so I don’t know when it’s coming up," Grassley added.
In a floor speech Nov. 5, Grassley said that, "every time we get close to marking up a Section 232 bill, Senator Wyden hears from stakeholders who are profiting from tariff protection. Meanwhile, I get calls from colleagues who say: Mr. Chairman, the President won’t like us taking away his tariff law, and we don’t want to make the President upset.
Though not "generally a fan of tariffs," Grassley said that he's agreed to Wyden's request to introduce a mark "that does not unwind the Section 232 measures on steel and aluminum." While there are "well documented" problems with the tariffs and quotas, "I’ve been in the Senate long enough to know that getting things done requires compromise," he said. Grassley added that he doesn't see Section 232 reforms as weakening the power of the president, because "the President is strongest when he has Congress behind him."
In the earlier phone call with reporters, Grassley said he wouldn't fight the pairing of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement with some other legislation, if the House leadership decided that was the best way to get USMCA ratified. There has been talk that a fix to multi-employer pension funds might be such a bill, since unions need that fix, and it might temper their criticism of the NAFTA rewrite (see 1910160054).
"I wouldn’t be opposed to some understanding that if USMCA comes up, something else might come up, it depends on what that something else is," Grassley said. "Hopefully, it’s something I want to see passed as well."