26
votes
Republicans rebuke Donald Trump's 50% emergency tariffs on Brazil in US Senate vote
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- Title
- Senate Republicans defy Vance's warning, vote to block Trump's Brazil tariffs amid shutdown
- Published
- Oct 28 2025
- Word count
- 538 words
In a way that lets them be performatively doing something to protect themselves in their purple districts without actually doing anything to fix what's happening. Wake me up when they actually vote in a way that changes things.
Avalanches start with pebbles but not every fallen rock signals an Avalanche.
Anything that takes them out of lock step conformity is a move in the right direction.
There are a lot of coffee and chocolate addicts in the US across party lines.
Yeah, but I've seen the Republican senators from Maine and Alaska do this song and dance for decades. They make these gestures to show dissatisfaction, get a little bit extra for their state sometimes, and then carry on letting things go to shit in ways that definitely hurt their constituents. Every time there's some hope they'll actually do something useful in the future, but it's just the same performance over and over again. They've been performatively out of lockstep with their colleagues without ever voting out of lockstep any time it's important.
Yeah, the Susan Collins’ “I think he learned his lesson” following Jan 6th will be burned into my memory forever. Progressive when it doesn’t count, conservative when it does.
That's been her whole game for decades, and it still fools people. She's always "very concerned about {thing constituents don't like}" and then votes right in line with the party, and it's been going on since I started being aware of politics during the Bush administration.
There is nothing remotely progressive about her. She's just a Republican from the most rural part of Maine, who puts on a show to bamboozle the more center/unaware types in a deeply purple state. Her campaigns basically boil down to saying "I'm already the senator, you don't need a new one."
True but this is what it looks like when they are feeling political pressure from voters.
They are trying to keep conservative coffee drinkers and chocolate lovers on their side with concessions but it might be too little too late.
Food inflation is happening and the Republicans control Congress and the presidency
What concessions, though? A vote that very specifically won't do anything at all for months, that will address the tarrifs around one country? That's down in "setting up a committee to discuss the possibility of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic on its next voyage" levels of action.
One thing that makes Trumps tariffs even dumber than other theoretical tariffs is that Trump put tariffs on agricultural products we can't possibly produce here. This is a proposed concession to the coffee drinkers and chocolate lovers being hit by tariff and inflation.
They wouldn't be offering any concessions if voters weren't screaming. Trump won by small margins. If they don't just straight up run a coup in 26 or 28, they need to try things to keep voters on their side. This is an example of them trying things because they feel vulnerable.
r/fivethirtyeight is a bunch of polling nerds I follow.
But correct me if I'm wrong, nothing changes with just the Senate voting and the House not touching it til Jan. The coffee drinkers got no actual wins today.
They got halfway through the process. Low information conservative voters who care about coffee prices won't notice the progress and will remain unhappy.
I'm a high information voter and I remain unhappy. And it's only 1/3 of the way through the process.
I think you're granting this too much credit. It's like Johnson saying that he is sure Trump won't try for a third term because it's unconstitutional but doesn't say he wouldn't support him trying and still isn't seating an elected Representative. He doesn't get a cookie when the bar is in literal hell.
You're not a conservative, nor am I. We have every right to be unhappy with the situation overall. It stinks.
I'm still happier when Republican law makers start acting nervous. There will be fliers and emails going out explaining that these few senators did this.
Wishing you and partner the best in this chaotic difficult time.
But what concession have they offered? An actual thing that they've done to change the situation, as opposed to a small something that the House will still have to vote on in two plus months because the House specifically banned themselves from doing anything about it before January? I don't see a concession here, I see theater.
If you think of this in football terms, it takes a lot of back and forth struggles to get a touchdown or Field goal.
Nothing a Congress member or senator can do works immediately because it always requires the other house. They passed their version of the bill and that's not nothing, it's not imaginary.
Legislative politics is a bit like siege warfare and a bit like poker. Depending on what the house does, this might turn out to be nothing, but to me it looks like something. Opposing Trump on any tariff is something and is what I meant by concession.
We'll see what the house does and later we'll see what election turnout looks like. Trump won on a vote the bums out platform. Now he's not delivering on his promises to lower grocery prices and bring back US jobs.
This is a good vote. The performaative part is that the other house is completely shut down And Lies Johnson won't ever even bring it up for a vote.
Yet another thing that needs to be forced to a vote after the epsteign stuff.
Sure, in a vacuum, this vote is good. But the fact that Johnson is 100% going to kill it and everyone knows it strips it of any value. Unless the House actually does something about it, and I'm not going to hold my breath.
This feels entirely performative to me. A few Rs being allowed to look like they care, all while millions of people are suffering because they refuse to extend healthcare benefits and end the shutdown. And because of the house rules, this will be completely forgotten about and never passed in the house.
The house of Representatives can't vote on this until January, but a few republican senators made a statement against tariffs on coffee and other Brazilian exports.