House Majority Leader Thinks House Would Have Voted to Stop 5% Tariff on Mexico
The House of Representatives was very close to taking a vote to stop 5 percent tariffs on Mexico, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said June 11. He said that vote could have come this week or next week, if President Donald Trump hadn't changed his mind. "What the president does is a pattern: Threaten things, then claim victory because something happened," he said. "We don't really know what the Mexicans are or aren't going to do. That is troublesome."
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
However, Hoyer said Congress may also be able to prevent Trump from resorting to tariffs on Mexico with more spending on immigration judges and aid for Central American countries. If decisions were made faster on asylum, that might discourage some who are traveling to the Southwest border, and if life were better in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the flow of migrants might ease. He said Congress had already allotted $500 million for each of those purposes in 2019, but they're not done.
"We need to appropriate significant sums ... to accommodate in a humanitarian way those folks who are fleeing oppression, violence, hear their plea for asylum ... and also deal with others, who perhaps are not asylum seekers," Hoyer said.