It’s been less than a week since President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff blitz against foreign nations, and Republicans on Capitol Hill are already in full-on freakout mode.
Throughout the past several days, GOP members of Congress have run to their favorite legacy media talking heads to express their supposed concerns that the president’s tariff policies could result in higher costs of living for everyday Americans. The latest example of this came on Tuesday, when Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., while speaking to reporters, discussed potential price increases consumers could be seeing in the coming weeks as a result of the tariffs.
“Does that concern you?” one reporter asked, to which Tillis replied, “Of course it concerns me. I mean, my god, it’s a stability issue. … We’ve got a lot of uncertainty.”
The Tarheel State senior senator’s comments were issued the same day he expressed skepticism and frustration with the administration’s tariff policy during a Senate Finance Committee hearing. While questioning U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Tillis asked, “Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves to be wrong?”
“It just seems like we’ve decided to begin a trade war on all fronts, and that’s OK, if the person who thought this through has an answer for why you go after partners that we have a very long storied relationship with,” Tillis said. “I wish you well, but I am skeptical.”
As noted by The Hill, Tillis — who’s up for reelection next year — joined six other GOP senators in signing onto legislation introduced by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., that seeks to “cut back the president’s authority to unilaterally impose tariffs.”
While it’s logical for Republicans to have questions about Trump’s long-term tariff strategy and the potential effects it could have on their voters’ checkbooks, it’s hard to take many of them seriously when they’ve spent years contributing to America’s inflation problem through reckless federal spending. Take Tillis, for example.
The North Carolina Republican has never been shy about voting for pork-filled spending packages that have come across his desk in recent years. This includes voting for Democrat-backed measures like the CHIPS Act ($250 billion) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($1 trillion) during the 117th Congress (2021-2023).
(Tillis has also been an enthusiastic supporter of shipping endless amounts of U.S. taxpayer money and resources to Ukraine, even going as far as to insult the intelligence of conservative voters who oppose such a policy.)
Economic analyses have indicated that these disastrous spending habits are a major contributing factor to the U.S. economy’s inflation problem.
For instance, a September 2023 report by The Heritage Foundation documented how “[o]pportunistic legislators from both parties” used the 2019 Covid outbreak “as cover for massive handouts to political constituencies, counterproductive expansions of welfare programs, and a variety of ill-conceived slush funds for state and local government entities.” This “commitment to tremendous new spending programs and central bank money-printing,” the analysis noted, “steered the economy into a devastating inflation spiral and a shaky recovery while also enabling (and implicitly encouraging) further lockdowns through intergovernmental subsidies and lengthy welfare expansions.”
“The deficit-fueled federal spending spree delivered painful economic consequences. The average American household has already lost $7,000 to the inflation and interest rate spike largely caused by this spending spree,” the 2023 report reads. “Employment has stagnated, and millions of workers are still missing from the labor force more than two years after the start of the pandemic.”
And yet, despite Americans still feeling the aftershocks of these reckless decisions, Republicans like Tillis show no signs of abandoning their addiction to more government spending.
The Senate’s recently passed reconciliation budget resolution, which contains several of Trump’s legislative priorities, does very little, if anything, to make meaningful spending cuts to the federal budget over the next 10 years. According to an analysis by PwC, a multinational accounting firm, the Senate’s proposal only includes a “minimum level of mandatory spending cuts of at least $4 billion across four committees,” whereas the House version requires a minimum of $1.5 trillion in cuts.
(Unfortunately, the Senate version — which is being considered by the House this week — has received Trump’s endorsement).
If Republicans like Tillis actually care about lowering Americans’ cost of living, then they should use their congressional majorities to significantly cut the federal budget they’ve spent years ballooning. Until then, nobody should take their supposed tariff “concerns” seriously.