Senate Majority Leader John Thune is lending crucial support for President Donald Trump’s ability to impose tariffs on Canada, citing the need to aid the administration’s fentanyl crackdown efforts.
Thune will urge senators to block a resolution offered by Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine seeking to terminate the president’s national emergency declaration justifying the president’s tariffs on Canadian imports — some of which are slated to go into effect Wednesday. The Senate GOP leader is expected to defend Trump’s emergency declaration mechanism as part of the administration’s broader efforts to stem the flow of fentanyl into the United States from Canada and Mexico, according to an excerpt of a speech Thune is expected to deliver later Tuesday, which was obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“If we’re serious about ending the fentanyl crisis in America, we need to address the entirety of the crisis,” Thune is expected to say on the Senate floor. “We’re not going to solve the problem by going after just part of it.”
“Ending this emergency declaration would tell the cartels that they should shift their focus to the northern border,” Thune is also expected to say. “I urge my colleagues to oppose this resolution and ensure that President Trump has the tools he needs to combat the flow of fentanyl from all directions.”
The Senate is expected to hold a vote on terminating the president’s emergency powers to impose tariffs on Canadian imports later on Tuesday. The vote is largely symbolic given House GOP leadership inserted language into the House rule for the most recent stopgap funding bill barring a lawmaker from forcing a vote on a resolution terminating Trump’s emergency declaration regarding fentanyl and illegal immigration.
Kaine has the authority to force a vote on Trump’s national emergency declaration under the 1976 National Emergencies Act, which is subject to a simple majority vote.
Trump issued a national emergency declaration on Feb. 1 to impose 25% across-the-board tariffs on Canadian goods with some exceptions on energy imports, citing the trafficking of narcotics, including fentanyl, from across the northern border into the United States.
“The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA),” Trump wrote in the declaration, citing in part Canada’s “growing footprint within international narcotics distribution.”
“A Super Bowl size group of Americans die each year from fentanyl that originates in communist China and works its way via the drug cartels in Mexico, through both Mexico and Canada, into the veins and stomachs of Americans to then die because of that,” White House trade advisor Peter Navarro previously told the Daily Caller, explaining how the Trump administration is using trade policy to combat the fentanyl crisis.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) seized an unprecedented amount of fentanyl — nearly 50,000 pounds — coming into the United States over the last two fiscal years, according to CBP data released in February.
Fentanyl was responsible for roughly 75,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2023, according to Centers for Disease Control data.
The Senate overwhelmingly passed legislation to crack down on fentanyl-related substances and impose harsher sentences on fentanyl traffickers on March 14. Thune is expected to cast his opposition to Kaine’s resolution as Senate Republicans’ latest effort to combat the fentanyl crisis and its smuggling across U.S. borders.
“Democrats seem to want to take a step backward in that fight [against fentanyl],” Thune is expected to say on the Senate floor. “We would be wrong to view this as solely a southern border problem. The reality is that fentanyl production is growing in Canada.”
Kaine is leading the Canada tariff termination effort with Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Warner of Virginia. He argued the president has made “spurious claims of a fentanyl crisis at the northern border on par with the drug situation at the southern border” in an op-ed for the Washington Post on Thursday.
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a consistent opponent of tariffs and critic of the president’s trade policy, is cosponsoring the Kaine resolution.
Thune told reporters “we’ll see” in response to a question about whether Senate GOP leadership will have the numbers to block the tariff termination effort Monday evening. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina suggested Monday evening that they will join with Senate Democrats in support of the Kaine resolution.
“We want to give the president as much as latitude as possible to deal with specific problems like that,” Thune told reporters Monday evening in reference to the fentanyl crisis. “But as you know I’m in a very different place when it comes to across-the-board tariffs and Canada.”
Senate Republicans, led by Conference Vice Chairman James Lankford, will take to the floor Wednesday in response to the vote on the president’s emergency powers. They are expected to defend Trump’s authority to use the Canada tariffs to halt the flow of fentanyl into the country.
Andi Shae Napier contributed to this report.
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