The US Senate on Tuesday approved a measure that would terminate Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Brazilian imports, including coffee, beef and other products, in a rare bipartisan show of opposition to the president’s trade war.
The vote passed 52-48.
The resolution, led by Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, seeks to overturn the national emergency that Trump has declared to justify the levies. But it is all but certain to stall in the US House, where the Republican-controlled chamber acted to pre-emptively shut down any attempt to block the president’s tariffs.
Even if the measure were to reach the president’s desk, it would meet Trump’s veto.
“Tariffs are a tax on American consumers. Tariffs are a tax on American businesses. And they are a tax that is imposed by a single person: Donald J Trump,” Kaine said in a floor speech.
“Tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive. The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule,” Republican Mitch McConnell said in a statement on Tuesday. “And no cross-eyed reading of Reagan will reveal otherwise.”
The renewed push in the Senate comes on the heels of an April vote, when four Republicans sided with Democrats to back a measure that would have rolled back tariffs on Canada. Among them were senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, former Republican leader McConnell, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, who co-sponsored the legislation.
However, a subsequent attempt to block Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs fell short, with two supporters of the effort absent from the vote, which needed a simple majority to pass.
In July, Trump declared a national emergency with respect to “recent policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Brazil” that he said amounts to an “unusual and extraordinary threat”.
Speaking to reporters, Kaine suggested the tariffs were retaliatory, linked to Brazil’s prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, a close ally of Trump, was convicted in September and sentenced to 27 years in prison for attempting a coup in 2022.
