President Donald Trump has the Founding Fathers on his side because the Founding Fathers, like Trump, always put America first.
As for a handful of Senate Republicans who oppose Trump’s America-first tariffs on Canada — Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, both of Kentucky — Paul, at least, may cite his sincerely-held-yet-deeply-flawed-and-unhistorical commitment to libertarian trade principles, whereas the other three have only an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome to explain their recalcitrance.
On Wednesday, according to Reason Magazine, those four GOP senators joined Democrats in adopting a resolution designed to cancel the president’s economic emergency declaration and thus prevent him from imposing his desired tariffs on Canada, notwithstanding at least one important signal in recent days that Canadian officials recognized Trump’s strong negotiating position on tariffs.
Republicans in the House of Representatives seem unlikely to concur in the resolution. Even if they did, Trump himself certainly would not sign it.
The measure, therefore, can have no practical effect besides slowing Trump’s tariff-related momentum and engendering intra-party bitterness. Foreigners, of course, love what the four GOP dissidents did, which makes it all the more reprehensible.
Meanwhile, former Vice President Mike Pence lent his marginal voice to the dissident cause.
“The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history,” Pence wrote Wednesday on the social media platform X.
The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history. These Tariffs are nearly 10x the size of those imposed during the Trump-Pence Administration and will cost American families over $3,500 per year. Check Out“Spoiling America’s Golden Age”@AmericanFreedom 👇 pic.twitter.com/2NghyDc8c1
— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) April 2, 2025
Never mind that Ontario Premier Doug Ford went on CNBC on Wednesday to pledge commercial reciprocity if Trump withdrew the tariffs.
Canadian leader Doug Ford proposes eliminating tariffs on US imports — if President Trump does the same | Diana Glebova, New York Post
Ontario Premier Doug Ford proposed Wednesday that Canada could drop its tariffs on US imports — if President Trump did the same for America’s… pic.twitter.com/tC636zuVFD
— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) April 3, 2025
This tariff issue features many different angles and conjures many hitherto forgotten historical arguments.
For instance, the libertarian Reason Magazine enthusiastically endorsed the four GOP dissidents. One must acknowledge that libertarians, for all their virtues, often cling to a series of annoying purity tests. No matter the context, freedom of whatever, as they define it, must prevail. The louder they proclaim it, the more satisfied they seem with themselves. Perhaps they do believe in free trade at all costs. Or, perhaps they think that merely saying so makes them, not you, the most libertarian person of all.
Of course, in the abstract, the argument for free trade has substantial merit. Personally, I always sympathized with 19th-century social scientist William Graham Sumner’s sharp critique of tariffs in the 1885 classic “Protectionism: The -Ism Which Teaches That Waste Makes Wealth.” I even assigned excerpts to beleaguered undergraduates.
On the whole, however, I much prefer Founding Father James Madison’s savvy blend of idealism and realism.
“A perfect freedom is the System which would be my choice,” Madison wrote to James Monroe in 1785. “But before such a system will be eligible perhaps for the U. S. they must be out of debt; before it will be attainable, all other nations must concur in it.”
In other words, free trade cannot exist when one party imposes restrictions and the other does not. That is exactly the system Trump is trying to change.
Would it be better if Republican lawmakers were as committed to voting together as Democrats are?
Moreover, debt — an overlooked element in Trump’s calculations — makes the abandonment of revenue tariffs impossible.
Indeed, modern Americans would scarcely believe the richness of Madison’s writings on trade policy as a general tool of statecraft.
Here, for instance, in 1795’s “Political Observations,” the then-future president dwelt at length on tariffs as a powerful instrument for altering the behavior of foreign governments, not to mention a desirable alternative to life- and freedom-destroying wars.
In short, the American statesman’s once-formidable reasoning on tariffs has long since atrophied. Trump is trying to bring the GOP kicking and screaming back to its intellectual roots. If only Republican senators would get on board — or at least get out of his way.
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