[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 193 (Monday, November 17, 2025)]
[House]
[Page H4672]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  CONGRESS MUST TAKE ACTION ON TARIFFS

  (Mr. Courtney of Connecticut was recognized to address the House for 
5 minutes.)
  Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, after months and months of President Trump 
insisting that his tariffs are not paid by Americans, insisting that 
tariffs don't drive up prices, insisting that there will be no 
exclusions on exemptions from his liberation day tariffs that he 
imposed back in April, on Friday afternoon the White House very quietly 
released a statement that they, in fact, are exempting and carving out 
tariffs for a number of goods, which were blindingly obvious were going 
to be costing more because we do not produce any of those goods here in 
this country.
  Included in his order are coffee, tea, fruit juices, tropical fruits, 
spices, bananas, oranges, and tomatoes. Obviously, if you talk to 
anybody who has been in a grocery store lately, the prices for all of 
those products have gone up by large margins, again, in the wake of the 
April tariffs that were put into place.
  Coffee is up 19 percent. Bananas are up 7 percent. Oranges and 
lettuce are up 3 and 4 percent.
  Again, it was so clear to anyone who was actually connected to the 
real world that grocery prices were going up and that we had to take 
steps to carve out exemptions for the sake of American consumers, our 
working families, and the middle class.
  It was amazing to see how the President, in October, was actually 
giving speeches where he said prices have come way down and that we 
have gotten prices way down for groceries. That is the mentality which 
is in that White House. Again, these were tariffs that he imposed 
unilaterally without consulting Congress.
  The question, though, is whether it is good that again there is going 
to be some price relief for some of these items, which never should 
have been tariffed to begin with. It begs the question about the rest 
of the economy that is getting harmed by tariffs.
  The National Association of Home Builders announced after the tariffs 
were announced that it would raise the average cost of a new home by 
$11,000 because of the fact that so many parts and pieces that go into 
new home construction are imported. That is just a reality in our 
economy.
  When we talk about the cost of living and affordability, if anything 
is close to maybe groceries, it is the cost of housing in terms of 
rents and getting new construction restarted.
  What about that, Mr. President? Why don't we also look at what is 
clearly happening in our economy right now and provide relief for the 
American people who are groaning under the high cost of living?
  The President has to look no further than the conservative Tax 
Foundation, which again is a right-of-center economic think tank. Its 
analysis is that, by October, tariffs have raised retail prices on all 
goods by nearly 5 percent relative to their pretariff trend line.
  Instead of solving high inflation, the Trump tariffs have continued 
it and, in some instances, increased it. This includes a 6 percent 
increase for imported goods and 4.3 percent for domestic goods because 
a lot of our domestic goods incorporate items that, again, are imported 
from overseas.
  The fundamental problem here is that this President believed in his 
mind that he himself had the power to impose these tariffs. Let's be 
very clear. A tariff is a tax on imported goods. It is a tax.
  I am from New England. Remember the Boston Tea Party? It was about a 
tariff on tea that the British Government was trying to force the 
American colonists to pay.
  A case was argued just a couple of weeks ago before the U.S. Supreme 
Court, where, again, the plaintiffs powerfully stated that the 
President did not have the authority to impose those taxes back in 
April. That is an Article I, Section 9 authority in the Constitution 
for the Congress.
  For the sake of reestablishing the checks and balances in our country 
and for the sake of the American economy, where issues like tariffs, 
which require a lot of analysis, are very complex, and require Congress 
to be part of that decisionmaking--in fact, we are the decisionmakers, 
according to the Constitution--those tariffs should be struck down. We 
should go back to basics, which is that when we deal with tax policy, 
it is the power of Congress that prevails in terms of making those 
kinds of decisions.
  The harm that has been done to the economy, the middle class, and 
working families because of the Trump tariffs, which, again, were just 
unilaterally and indiscriminately imposed against some countries that 
we actually have trade surpluses with, has to be rolled back.
  There was an admission on Friday by the administration that their 
tariff policy has failed, and it is time for Congress to stand up and 
do its job to rebalance our economy.

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