00:00The Republican-led U.S. House has passed legislation aimed at ending President Trump's tariffs on Canada.
00:06The move signals growing anxiety over the White House economic agenda ahead of midterm elections.
00:11Let's bring in our Washington Deputy Bureau Chief, Laura Davidson.
00:14Laura, I mean, this legislation needs to be signed by the president anyway.
00:19So how much is this about sending a message, basically?
00:23This is right now all about sending a message.
00:26Trump is very unlikely to sign this legislation.
00:28In fact, he said he would veto it and threatened all the Republicans who voted to pass this.
00:33You know, in order to override that veto, you'd need two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate,
00:38and that is highly unlikely to come to pass.
00:40But what this really signals is a growing rift within the Republican Party as they're headed into an election year.
00:45There's a lot of tricky dynamics here of, you know, Republicans have to face voters,
00:48and they're worried about these tariffs as voters are increasingly worried about affordability and cost of living issues.
00:54Trump, however, is, you know, is very angry at the Republicans who joined with Democrats on this vote,
00:59and he's threatening to primary them.
01:01This is a big deal because, you know, all Republicans before the general election in November,
01:06they will have primary races where they will be up against other Republicans.
01:09Those are scattered across the spring and into the summer.
01:11So if Trump wants to take some of these to task and try to oust them from office before they
01:16even get to the general,
01:17he could do that.
01:20So it does look like among Republicans they are wavering a little on the president's economic agenda.
01:28I wonder what this means for tariffs with the closest neighbors to the U.S.
01:33At a time where there's a review coming up for the U.S. MCA,
01:37Trump has been threatening tariffs on Canada.
01:40Where does this leave things?
01:43Yeah, this leaves everything really in a really precarious position.
01:46We have sort of three things happening here.
01:47We have one, we have the House, the Congress expressing discontent with these tariffs.
01:52This today's vote was specifically about Canada,
01:54but they are likely to vote, have other votes in the future that might deal with the Mexico tariffs,
01:58tariffs on Brazil, for example.
02:00We also have a looming Supreme Court case that could knock down a lot of these tariffs.
02:04You know, there could be, you know, as soon as later this month, a decision on that.
02:08And third, we have this looming U.S. MCA renegotiation period.
02:12You know, in the past, these have been sort of pro forma.
02:14You know, they just agreed to extend these deals with maybe some minor changes.
02:18But Trump is really is thinking about, according to Bloomberg reporting,
02:21pulling out of this deal entirely.
02:23That would be a huge sea change.
02:24Of course, this is a deal that he signed and negotiated in his first term.
02:28So this would, you know, really eliminate all the rules of the road of trade in North America
02:33and could be a huge upset to global trading patterns.
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