Eight Republicans, led by Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., asked the Commerce Department to reconsider how importers of hardwood plywood can participate in a certification regime, so that CBP knows those imports are not within the scope of an anti-circumvention case on Vietnamese hardwood plywood with Chinese inputs.
Rep. Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat representing a district with a majority of Donald Trump voters, has introduced a bill to impose a blanket 10% additional tariff on all imports, an echo of Trump's original proposal. The former president later said he might impose a 20% tariff on those imports.
An effort to change CBP rules to allow more information sharing on counterfeits with rights holders has been attached to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said this week.
A hearing about the Time to Choose Act, a bipartisan bill that would ban consultants and other service providers from working both with the U.S. government and Chinese-owned companies, Senate Homeland Security Committee ranking member Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he agreed with a witness who said it could create a slippery slope.
More than 70 members of the House of Representative are asking the administration to ask the European Union to delay its deforestation reporting requirements, which they say would be impossible to meet for wood chips and fluff pulp, used in menstrual pads and diapers.
Three Republican senators reintroduced a bill to end permanent normal trade relations with China, and to set tariff rates of at least 35% for Chinese goods, if the Column 2 tariffs are not that high, as well as 100% tariffs on 38 pages of Harmonize Tariff Schedule lines enumerated in the bill.
Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee and chairman of the Budget Committee, recently introduced a bill that would allow the administration to impose Section 301 tariffs on goods made outside of China if they are made by Chinese firms.
The House Homeland Security Committee passed the Contraband Awareness Technology Catches Harmful (CATCH) Fentanyl Act on Sept. 25, sending the bill to the full House. It would require CBP to establish a pilot program to test at least five types of non-intrusive inspection equipment for goods coming in all modes of conveyance across the land borders. At least one of those approaches must include machine learning or artificial intelligence. No more than three years after passage, the agency would have to report to Congress the effectiveness of the systems tested in finding illegal drugs, guns and other contraband, whether it would work to use the equipment to serve all the land ports of entry, how much it would cost to do so, and how much time would CBP officers need to run these screens.
A bill to require the Justice Department to establish a trade-crime task force, and to allow for parallel criminal and civil enforcement actions, passed the House Judiciary Committee unanimously. The bill, called the Protecting American Industry and Labor from International Crimes Act, was sponsored by the leaders of the House Select Committee on China and Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, another China committee member.
The chair and co-chair of the House Select Committee on China told an audience of Uyghur activists and others concerned about Chinese human rights abuses that they are pleased recommendations from their committee have become legislation.