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In 1993, Democrats voted against NAFTA by 156-102 and against it in the Senate by a narrower 28-27. Now, Democrats are mourning the death of what they claim is the last vestige of NAFTA.
President Trump’s tariffs, they claim, are killing the ‘free trade’ that the Dems once opposed, before they supported it, and before they opposed it.
NAFTA cost Republicans the White House, but Bill Clinton’s embrace of it cost Democrats the South. Clinton had manipulated and misled working class Democrats into believing that he would either reject or fundamentally transform NAFTA and lost the white working class vote.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, then a mere member of Congress, had originally voted against NAFTA.
When President Trump proposed replacing NAFTA with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement , Schumer praised the move but still like then Sen. Kamala Harris, voted against it because it didn’t do enough for global warming.
“We’re going to fight these tariffs tooth and nail,” Sen. Schumer now vows.
This is the same Schumer who has spent years berating Canada for “restrictive trade policies”
Rep. Rosa DeLauro built her reputation on fighting NAFTA. “I put my heart and soul into defeating this,” she recalled six years ago. “We were on the floor every morning, every night.”
“President Trump’s trade war on Canada and Mexico, which are part of the USMCA trade agreement, driven by his 25% tariff on nearly all imports from those countries, will drive up prices on all Americans,” Rep. DeLauro now argues. “I condemn President Trump launching a trade war that absolutely guarantees price increases on key products as well as retaliatory tariffs that will affect exporters across many states.”
Democrats supported and implemented tariffs from the very beginning. From Jefferson’s Embargo Act to Madison’s Tariff of 1816, formed in response to British economic warfare closely resembling that of modern day China, not only the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution, but key figures in the Democratic Republican Party knew the value of tariffs.
American independence required economic leverage. The idea that the world was one big free market with no regard to borders or national interests was fanciful nonsense that they would for the most part have rejected out of hand. The debate was concerned on which parts of the country would benefit from tariffs and which parts of the country would be harmed by them.
When the Democrats ‘internationalized’ under Woodrow Wilson and FDR, they fully embraced free trade. The dismantling of tariffs in the 1930s became a signature part of FDR’s global agenda, seizing control of tariffs (perhaps unconstitutionally) from Congress and using it as an instrument of both domestic and foreign policy is one of the unresolved crises of the New Deal.
Democrats are vocally complaining about President Trump using a power they gave FDR.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Democrats viewed free trade as an anti-capitalist program for fighting ‘trusts’ and ‘bosses’ by using ‘free trade’ to weaken American companies. Tariffs were supposed to be an instrument of the rich and removing them was alleged to help the poor. The package of taking down tariffs and putting up taxes was economic class warfare.
At least it was until major corporations embraced it and used it to ship production overseas.
In reality, dismantling tariffs centralized government power which is why the Revenue Act of 1894 under President Grover Cleveland, one of the country’s worst presidents, also gave us the first non-war income tax. Dismantling tariffs required imposing taxes which then had to be struck down by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company. It would take an alliance of Democrats and Progressives to impose taxes through the Sixteenth Amendment.
Why was there a sudden need for an income tax amendment in 1913? Later that year, Democrats passed the Tariff Act of 1913, slashing tariffs and adding a corporate tax. Among Democrats and some Republicans opposition to tariffs was wedded to a program of tax hikes and class warfare. Cheap foreign goods were tied to higher taxes on the ‘rich’.
But despite the class warfare rhetoric, too many people in Democrat constituencies were hurt by dismantling tariffs. Democrats supported those tariffs that they believed aided the ‘working class’ as they defined it and opposed those that they believed benefited American corporations.
Democrat tariffs like LBJ’s retaliatory ‘Chicken Tax’ appealed to key political demographics. Bill Clinton’s NAFTA doubletalk showed how popular tariffs still were with the Democrat base. And a generation of Democrats ran against NAFTA and denounced it as a tool of economic destruction. By the late 90s, leftists rioted in the streets of major cities against free trade.
The 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle brought together unions and Antifa for the worst non-racial rioting until the first Trump administration. The ‘Battle in Seattle’ was part of the larger movement of leftist economic riots and occupations culminating in Occupy Wall Street.
Democrat supporters of NAFTA and free trade learned to be careful about their views.
Now the Democrats want to act like they are the greatest supporters of free trade and the greatest opponents of tariffs. In reality, their policy on tariffs and trade have been linked to some form of class warfare for at least the last 130 years. Their opposition to President Trump’s efforts to roll back tariffs worldwide rings hollow especially since Trump’s Liberation Day program is a more aggressive version of FDR’s Reciprocal Tariff Act that emphasizes the stick over the carrot. Rather than attempting to lower foreign tariffs through a mass series of reciprocal deals, Trump is trying to lower them with mass retaliatory tariffs. That may or may not work, but Dems should stop pretending that they’re either pragmatically or ideologically opposed to them.
Tariffs have been a subject of debate since America’s Founding. Key figures like Jefferson have held different views of them at different times. But the Democrat pretense that tariffs are a crazy policy that they always opposed is as dishonest as their previous insistence that they always opposed racism and presidential third terms when they were the prime champions of all three.
Democrats aren’t born-again free-traders, they’re born again traitors. Their objective is economic sabotage above all else. Their best bet for taking the House and then the White House is to tank the economy and they are guilty of everything they accused Trump of doing.
Leftists are not enemies of tariffs: they’re enemies of America.
