Democrats and Republicans Were For Tariffs Before They Were Against Them. Or Vice Versa.

In 1993, Democrats voted against NAFTA by 156-102 and against it in the Senate by a narrower 28-27. Now, Democrats are mourning the death of what they claim is the last vestige of NAFTA.

NAFTA had been the work of a Republican president, but few Republicans want to claim it or the mantle of free trade.

NAFTA cost Republicans the White House, but Bill Clinton’s embrace of it cost Democrats the South. Clinton had manipulated and misled working class Democrats into believing that he would either reject or fundamentally transform NAFTA and lost the white working class vote.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, then a mere member of Congress, had originally voted against NAFTA.

When President Trump proposed replacing NAFTA with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement , Schumer praised the move but still like then Sen. Kamala Harris, voted against it because it didn’t do enough for global warming.

“We’re going to fight these tariffs tooth and nail,” Sen. Schumer now vows.

Democrats complain that President Trump’s tariffs are killing the ‘free trade’ that they once opposed, before they supported it, and before they opposed it. And Republicans used to oppose free trade before they supported it and then once again came around to opposing it. If that’s confusing, consider Rep. Rosa DeLauro.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro built her reputation on fighting NAFTA. “I put my heart and soul into defeating this,” she recalled six years ago. “We were on the floor every morning, every night.”

“President Trump’s trade war on Canada and Mexico, which are part of the USMCA trade agreement, driven by his 25% tariff on nearly all imports from those countries, will drive up prices on all Americans,” Rep. DeLauro now argues. “I condemn President Trump launching a trade war that absolutely guarantees price increases on key products as well as retaliatory tariffs that will affect exporters across many states.”

The USMCA was Trump’s replacement for NAFTA.

America was arguably built on tariffs. Alexander Hamilton championed them and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison came around to implementing them from Jefferson’s Embargo Act, proposed by him as an alternative to military action to Madison’s Tariff of 1816, formed in response to British economic warfare closely resembling that of modern day China.

The roots of Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ were laid when Congress allowed FDR to take control of tariffs, unconstitutionally depriving the legislative branch of one of its powers and allowing the president to broadly dismantle tariffs and reconstruct global relationships with the Reciprocal Tariff Act. Democrats are complaining that Trump is wrongly using a power over tariffs that their party chose to turn over to FDR.

But Democrats had a very different perspective on tariffs then than they do now.

When the Democrats ‘internationalized’ under Woodrow Wilson and FDR, they embraced free trade, but even before that the party had come to see free trade as an anti-capitalist program for fighting ‘trusts’ and ‘bosses’ by bringing in cheaper products from abroad.

Taking down tariffs was economic class warfare. Tariffs were supposed to be an instrument of the rich and removing them was alleged to help the poor. Various taxes, especially income taxes on the rich, were to fill the fall in tariff revenues.

That's why the Revenue Act of 1894 under President Grover Cleveland also gave us the first non-war income tax. Dismantling tariffs required imposing taxes. Those taxes were struck down by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company. It would take an alliance of Democrats and Progressives to impose taxes through the Sixteenth Amendment.

Why was there a sudden need for an income tax amendment in 1913? Later that year, Democrats passed the Tariff Act of 1913, slashing tariffs and adding a corporate tax. Among Democrats and liberal Republicans opposition to tariffs was wedded to a program of tax hikes and class warfare.

But free trade didn't hurt American corporations, rather it allowed them to outsource production abroad while wiping out American manufacturing. And Republicans, who had once supported tariffs, became born-again free traders, even as Democrats became skeptical about free trade.

Too many working people in Democrat constituencies were hurt by dismantling tariffs. And Democrats supported those tariffs that they believed aided the ‘working class’ as they defined it and opposed those that they believed benefited American corporations.

Democrat tariffs like LBJ’s retaliatory ‘Chicken Tax’ appealed to key political demographics. Bill Clinton’s NAFTA doubletalk showed how popular tariffs still were with the Democrat base. And a generation of Democrats ran against NAFTA and denounced it as a tool of economic destruction. By the late 90s, leftists rioted in the streets of major cities against free trade.

The 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle brought together unions and Antifa for the worst non-racial rioting until the first Trump administration. The ‘Battle in Seattle’ was part of the larger movement of leftist economic riots and occupations culminating in Occupy Wall Street. Democrat supporters of NAFTA and free trade learned to be careful about their views.

Tariffs have been a subject of debate since America’s Founding. Key figures like Jefferson have held different views of them at different times. But the Democrat pretense that tariffs are a crazy policy that they always opposed is as dishonest as their previous insistence that they always opposed racism and presidential third terms when they were the prime champions of all three.

Democrats aren’t born-again free-traders, they’re born again traitors. Their objective is economic sabotage above all else. Their best bet for taking the House and then the White House is to tank the economy and they are guilty of everything they accused Trump of doing.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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