Grassley Says Section 232 Reform Probably Cannot Move Before Election Day
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said his desire to give Congress more power to determine when national security tariffs are warranted is stymied by a lack of votes in his committee.
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“Maybe two, three months ago I said to my members on my committee, 'I want to move forward on [Section] 232 just in regular order,'” he said to reporters May 28. That means he would not work out a compromise between competing approaches from Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., but instead, see where consensus could form through votes on amendments to a draft.
But, Grassley said, he told them: “I don’t want to move forward unless we’re actually going to get a bill out of committee,” and he realized there aren't the votes to do so. “It's difficult to get bipartisan agreement on what to do,” he said, and some Republicans don't want to vote for reform because they don't want to be seen as “anti-Trump,” he said.
Grassley also touched on the phase one deal with China and tariff deferral on the call.
He said he supports another round of tariff deferral for importers, but that he has not pushed for that to happen with the administration yet. “If it is necessary for me to speak [to the Treasury secretary], I will do that,” he said. His counterpart in the House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., told International Trade Today that he's been pressing the U.S. trade representative for another period of deferral (see 2005150057).
Grassley said he had a short conversation on the phone with President Donald Trump, asking if higher tension with China will interfere with the phase one trade deal.
“In some people's minds, China ought to suffer, and we ought to stop trading with China. But you can imagine what that would do to agriculture,” he said. “Even though we have trouble with China now, between the World Health Organization, and their lack of transparency over how they handled the [novel corona]virus, that shouldn't interfere with trade,” he said is his view, expressed to Trump during the conversation. “I was very satisfied with his answer” to that, he added.