Congress is being pushed to rein in President Donald Trump’s tariff powers after voters signaled they had had enough. An NBC News exit poll from 45 states found that 66 percent of voters thought his tariffs had hurt the national economy.
That rebuke matters now because the incoming Congress is expected to tackle unpopular policies, and tariffs are near the top of the list. The fight is not just about prices or trade theory. It is about whether Congress wants to take back some of the authority Trump used to launch his second-term trade war.
The main tools in that fight are Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Section 232 lets a president impose national security sectoral tariffs. Section 301 has helped prop up baseline tariffs of 10-12 percent on nearly all US imports. Lawmakers have been discussing bills since 2018 to deal with those statutes and the way they are used, and most of the ideas cluster around three fixes: limiting executive abuse, improving transparency and procedural safeguards, and narrowing what the laws are meant to cover.
Trump’s tariffs have not only landed on allies and adversaries alike. They have also strained relationships that Congress may now have to repair. The cost is not abstract. Businesses and consumers absorbed it, and the political damage was visible in November, when voters delivered a stunning defeat to the president’s party in the midterm elections.
The catch is that turning that anger into law will not be simple. Congress has debated guardrails on trade authorities since Trump’s first-term trade war was launched, but the same powers that make tariffs easy to impose also make them hard to unwind. Canadians, in particular, are now more likely to view the US with suspicion, or even as an enemy or potential threat, than as a friend.
So the next move is likely to be a test of whether Congress wants a real brake on presidential trade power or just another round of warnings. If lawmakers act, the first vote will tell whether they mean to narrow Section 232 and Section 301 in practice, or only in principle.
