The House voted on Wednesday to rescind tariffs that President Trump imposed on Canada last year, delivering a largely symbolic but politically consequential rebuke that Republicans had fought for a year to prevent.
In a 219-to-211 vote, six Republicans joined nearly all Democrats in backing the resolution sponsored by Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee. While the Senate has moved to cancel the president’s tariffs in recent months, the vote was the House’s first opportunity to formally register a position on Mr. Trump’s trade policy since he returned to the White House and began deploying tariffs as an economic strategy.
Despite succeeding in the House, the measure is unlikely to have any practical effect given that Mr. Trump would almost certainly veto it. Still, its movement through the House reflects frustration among some G.O.P. lawmakers about Congress continuing to cede its authority over trade matters to the White House, and concern that voters are being hurt by the levies.
“There is not a national emergency,” Mr. Meeks declared from the House floor while urging his colleagues to support the resolution. He and other Democrats argued that Mr. Trump’s signature economic policy was “not a strategy” but an “impulse.”
For the last year, House Republican leaders have shielded their members from being forced to vote on the issue by manipulating the definition of a “day” in Congress to prevent challenges from maturing. But they failed this week to muster the support in their own ranks to push it off once more.
The result was that scores of Republicans, including those facing potentially difficult re-election fights, went on the record backing tariffs that some of their constituents fear could be disastrous.
Last February, Mr. Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to declare a national security emergency and impose tariffs of 25 percent on all imports from Canada and Mexico, as well as 10 percent on products from China. He cited border security failures tied to drug trafficking and illegal migration.
Republicans argued that those aims justified the president’s emergency declaration.
Representative Brian Mast of Florida, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said during a speech that “this is not a debate about tariffs” or the president’s authority, but about curbing the flow of illicit drugs into the United States.
“They don’t see any of it as a national emergency,” Mr. Mast said of Democrats who pushed the resolution.
But while fentanyl has flooded North America’s drug supply over the past decade, killing tens of thousands of people in the United States and Canada, less than 0.1 percent of the fentanyl arriving in the United States in 2023 came from Canada, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
For decades, Republicans opposed tariffs and promoted free trade and open markets. But under Mr. Trump, they have largely acquiesced to his protectionist policies.
Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Dan Newhouse of Washington and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania were the Republicans who broke ranks to support the resolution’s passage.
Representative Jared Golden of Maine was the only Democrat to vote against the resolution.
As the vote was unfolding and Republicans neared defeat, Mr. Trump took to social media to threaten those who objected to his authority.
“Any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against TARIFFS will seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries!” he wrote on his social media site, arguing that the policy had been beneficial to the economy. He added that “no Republican should be responsible for destroying this privilege.”
While a handful of Republicans have joined Democrats’ challenges to Mr. Trump’s approach, the defections fall far short of the two-thirds majority needed in both chambers to override a veto.
Still, after successfully passing the resolution targeting the emergency declaration used to justify the Canadian tariffs, Democrats hope to have similar success with challenges they have queued up to the global tariffs Mr. Trump issued in April as well as those he imposed on Mexico, China and Brazil.
A similar set of resolutions passed the Senate in October, when three Republicans joined all Democrats in backing legislation challenging the president’s emergency-based tariff authority.
Even after his own members dealt him a stinging defeat on the House floor on the matter on Tuesday night, Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, argued that Congress had no business intervening in Mr. Trump’s trade policy.
“The tariffs have been a tool that the president has used very effectively to level the playing field and put America back on top, and I think it’s wrong for Congress to step in the middle of that,” Mr. Johnson said Wednesday morning in an interview on Fox Business.
He noted that ultimately the question of the president’s power could be determined by the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in November on a case challenging the legality of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Six companies and several states have argued that the president exceeded his authority by using the emergency statute to impose them on nearly every U.S. trading partner.
During oral arguments, key members of the court’s conservative majority joined liberal justices in sharply questioning the administration’s assertion that it has the power to unilaterally impose tariffs without congressional approval. Several justices also noted that Mr. Trump was the first president to claim that the decades-old emergency statute authorized tariffs.
The debate in Congress and action in the court are unfolding as lawmakers stare down midterm election races in which the economy and affordability could be key issues. Mr. Trump’s tariffs have not been as damaging to the U.S. economy as many economists had feared, largely because the administration delayed and scaled many of them back or offered exemptions for certain imports.
While Mr. Trump insists that the tariffs are making the United States rich and giving him substantial leverage against America’s trading partners, the impact on the U.S. economy has been mixed.
The tariffs did give the United States a significant revenue boost, with customs duties, taxes and fees rising to approximately $287 billion last year. That was nearly triple the 2024 total. The U.S. trade deficit — a metric that matters a lot to Mr. Trump — also declined sharply last year, falling to its lowest level since 2009 in October.
However, the manufacturing boom that Mr. Trump has promised has yet to materialize. Factory construction has been slow and producers of cars and other machinery have been hit by higher costs of metals.
Ann E. Marimow and Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
Robert Jimison covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on defense issues and foreign policy.
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