The Senate approved House Ways and Means Chief Trade Counsel Katherine Tai to be the U.S. Trade Representative with no opposition. The Senate voted 98-0 in favor of the confirmation.
Ireland's Prime Minister Micheál Martin told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce audience that as the U.S. is looking for trusted partners to make sure its supply chains are resilient, it should look to Ireland. He noted that his country was the fifth-largest supplier of coronavirus-related goods.
Central American ambassadors and the Secretariat for Central American Economic Integration asked an audience to rediscover the region as a source of trusted supply chain partners and a way to achieve quicker deliveries with a lower carbon footprint.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, one of the leaders of an effort to give Congress more of a voice in Section 232 tariffs, reintroduced a bipartisan bill with six co-sponsors that would give the Defense Department responsibility for certifying that imports are a national security threat, and would allow Congress to rescind trade restrictions under Section 232 through the use of a joint resolution of disapproval. Portman explained that disapproval is limited to oil restrictions, and that was added to the statute in 1980 “in response to concerns about the misuse of the statute.”
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan will be meeting with some top Chinese officials March 18, but the trade war will not be front and center, he told reporters at a White House press conference March 12. A reporter asked what China would have to do for the U.S. to reduce or lift tariffs, or loosen export controls. “I don’t expect that, for example, the phase one trade deal is going to be a major topic of conversation next week,” Sullivan said; instead, it will be more about geopolitical issues and human rights, not details on tariffs and export controls. “But we will communicate that the United States is going to take steps, in terms of what we do on technology, to ensure that our technology is not being used in ways that are inimical to our values or adverse to our security. We will communicate that message at a broad level,” he said. He added that before the U.S. can begin negotiating on trade, there's more work to do with allies, “to come up with a common approach, a joint approach, before we go sit down point by point with the Chinese government on these issues.”
The top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee said he and the committee chairman have not discussed whether renewing the Miscellaneous Tariff Bill is going to have to wait for an infrastructure package to move. “I know [Generalized System of Preferences (GSP)] and MTB are very much on the radar,” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, told reporters on a March 12 conference call. “We just haven’t gotten a signal about the timing there. Really the COVID stimulus has sucked up all the oxygen at this point.”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, reintroduced the Global Trade Accountability Act, a bill that would not allow any hike in tariffs, tightening of tariff-rate quotas, or other restrictions on imports to go forward unless the House and Senate approve. Sens. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., co-sponsored the bill, which was first introduced in 2017. Temporary tariffs or quotas would be allowed under a national emergency but would expire after 90 days without congressional approval. “Congress has ceded far too much of its lawmaking power to the executive branch, including the power to unilaterally raise tariffs,” Lee said in a March 11 news release. “Sudden hikes in trade barriers can have real and devastating impacts on American small businesses, farmers, and families, including in my home state of Utah.” Paul said that in “a constitutional republic, tax increases should never be imposed by the whim of one person.”
Therese Randazzo, director of the forced labor division in the trade remedy and law enforcement directorate at CBP, said that although there have been far more withhold release orders than findings since legislation eliminated a forced labor loophole in 2015, the trade community should expect to see more findings in the future. Randazzo, who was speaking on a panel on forced labor at the annual Georgetown Law International Trade Update on March 11, declined to comment on whether CBP has opened an investigation into forced labor in polysilicon from China (see 2101080044). That's an input for solar panels, and about two-thirds of the world's solar panels are made in China.
The U.S Commission on International Religious Freedom, an advisory committee to Congress, heard from four witnesses that passing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is the most important thing the U.S. could do to convince companies that sell in the U.S. to exit China's Xinjiang region. One witness, from the Heritage Foundation, said a better first step would be a two-year region-wide withhold release order, which would give CBP time to gather more convincing evidence about the scope of forced labor in the western Chinese province.
The 15% tariffs on civil aircraft and 25% tariffs on about 150 tariff lines of products including liquor, Italian food and beverages, lenses, Greek yogurt, Spanish pork and more were lifted at 12:01 a.m. March 11, and will remain suspended until midnight July 10.