Fiscal conservative cheers GOP for standing up to Trump on key economic issue

A conservative commentator cheered the six Republican legislators who stood up to President Donald Trump on his tariff hikes — and expressed regret that more Republicans have not done likewise.

“Here are three cheers for the six House Republicans who voted with nearly all Democrats to repeal President Trump’s tariffs against Canada,” Merrill Matthews from the Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy wrote for The Hill. “They bucked their party and their leadership, and especially Trump, to do the right thing.”

He added, “The shame isn’t that the six voted with Democrats, but that no other Republicans joined them.”

The six Republican House members in question include Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Dan Newhouse of Washington. Each of them voted with the House Democrats to repeal Trump’s unilaterally levied tariffs against Canada, which the legislators argue are both un-Constitutional and economically harmful.

“I've heard clearly from small and large manufacturers as well as agricultural producers that these tariffs are hurting them,” Hurd told CNN’s Manu Raju last week. In his editorial, Matthews reinforces observations like those made by Hurd with hard data.

“Here’s the direct quote from Harvard’s ‘Tariff Tracker’ study Trump mentioned,” Matthews wrote, quoting them as saying “assuming full pass-through at the border and a 50 percent import cost share at the retail level, our results suggest that U.S. consumers paid up to 43 percent of the tariff burden, with the rest absorbed by U.S. firms.”

Matthews also quoted the Congressional Budget Office’s new study, which concluded “U.S. businesses will absorb 30 percent of the import price increases by reducing their profit margins; the remaining 70 percent will be passed through to consumers by raising prices,” as well as the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which reported “between January and August of last year Americans took 94 percent of the hit from Trump’s tariffs. During September and October, that ebbed to 92 percent, settling to 86 percent in November.”

Matthews acknowledged that “disagreeing with Trump is politically perilous” and said that, for this reason, “it is politically commendable that six Republicans were willing to run the Trump gauntlet or retire. As we head to the midterm elections, Republican incumbents will be running political ads claiming they have the courage to stand up to liberal Democrats.”

He concluded, “The real question is whether they have the courage to stand up to Trump when he’s wrong.”

Whereas Matthews argued it is treacherous for Republicans to oppose Trump, other conservatives have argued it is more dangerous to not oppose him on an issue as costly to ordinary people as his tariffs. Writing for The Bulwark last week, conservative pundit Mona Charen argued “voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs. Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs.”

She concluded, “Experience has changed their views.” Reporting for the Financial Times, journalist Alan Beattie observed that “it's now implanted in public discourse that American companies and consumers, not foreigners, are paying the tariff costs.” Organizations whose constituencies largely supported Trump, such as farmers, are turning on the tariffs.

“The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and its members cannot stand behind the president while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentinian beef in an attempt to influence prices,” Colin Woodall, head of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said in a statement.

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