Finally, someone's awake

In a sign that there is hope for a better government, a bipartisan bill in the U.S. Senate seeks to reassert the authority over trade granted to Congress in the Constitution.

The Congress abdicated (delegated is actually the word they’ll use) that responsibility to the president back in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act had deepened it in an attempt to protect American businesses.

But that was back in the day when Americans expected and demanded normalcy and decency in a president, not when they celebrated one who could obliterate more societal/political/legal norms before breakfast than his 45 predecessors did in the entire history of the country.

But here we are, and it seems a telling indictment of the current national character that our leaders couldn’t find the collective will to start calling a halt to what half the country’s hair has been on fire about until the heat started to burn down Wall Street.

That happened in the last few days of stock trading, which affects you a great deal whether you realize it or not. Something like a fifth of all the dollars earned and spent in this country in a year — by you, me, every corporation, all of us — is what just disappeared as President Donald Trump insisted on launching a trade war against the rest of the world with tariffs on imports to the United States. The plan, if you can call it that, is a surefire inflation booster.

Trump says he wants to reshape the entire world’s economy to be fairer to the United States. We do too much for everybody else.

We already reshaped it after World War II with 80 years of careful negotiations and diplomacy that have made the United States the essential nation to lead the world forward. But Trump has advocated for a more go-it-alone economy most of his life, and he wants to take us back further, to simpler times when buggy whips and import tariffs were considered necessary to move forward.

The last week’s economic devastation apparently inspired action that a chainsaw approach to dismantling the U.S. government couldn’t, or what attacks on Social Security, health care, scientific research, and education couldn’t; or what the deportation of good, contributing American residents couldn’t, or the off-the-street abductions of legitimate non-citizen residents to foreign horror prisons that we are paying for could not.

But let’s be grateful for the glimmer of hope that the Trade Review Act of 2025 represents. It’s sponsored by Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington, a Democrat representing the nation’s most trade-dependent state, and Chuck Grassley, a Republican of Iowa and the Senate’s most senior member with 44 years’ experience. Both of them have a lot of farmers to answer to, farmers who export crops and ship food to the hungry around the world — or they did until the administration dismantled the USAID agency that has been proving to the rest of the world for decades that we’re the good guys.

The new bill is modeled on the War Powers Resolution of 1973, another effort to reassert congressional authority, passed as a result of the Vietnam War.

“Trade wars can be as devastating, which is why the Founding Fathers gave Congress the clear Constitutional authority over war and trade,” Cantwell said. “This bill reasserts Congress’s role over trade policy to ensure rules-based trade policies are transparent, consistent, and benefit the American public. Arbitrary tariffs, particularly on our allies, damage U.S. export opportunities and raise prices for American consumers and businesses. As representatives of the American people, Congress has a duty to stop actions that will cause them harm.”

As of last night, seven Republican senators had agreed, a huge number in today’s divided political climate.

Whether it passes or not, the fact that that many Republicans in the current U.S. Senate can see Trump as possibly fallible is a bright light from which to take some comfort in our current darkness.

Our representatives in the House, the 4th District’s Dan Newhouse, and the 5th District’s Michael Baumgartner, should get behind a companion bill in the House to finally inject some normal decency into our national leadership.

Scott Hunter — editor and publisher