How Sen. Kaine Won Over Leadership With Trump-Fighting Playbook
When Sen. Tim Kaine launched a new strategy to hold President Donald Trump and Republicans accountable for this administration’s power-grabbing moves, Democratic leadership was resistant. But now they’re embracing it.
In the aftermath of Trump’s win, with Republicans also controlling both the House and Senate, Kaine asked his staff to find everything in statute and Senate procedure that would allow a single senator to force a floor vote. When the new Congress began, and Kaine saw what he considered to be sweeping overreach from the president, he was already armed with the idea of privileged resolutions, which must be brought up for a vote regardless of the party in charge.
“They were not happy with the idea initially,” Kaine (D-Va.) told Bloomberg Government reporters and editors in his Capitol Hill office on Friday about his push to force a vote to repeal Trump’s tariffs on Canada. “There was a little bit of slowness out of the gate in terms of reorienting to the minority.”
Kaine is now full throttle on that method, forcing a successful rebuke Trump on his tariffs on Canada, an unsuccessful one challenging his energy emergency order, and now planning one to force a human rights report to El Salvador.
Senate Democrats have faced pressure and scrutiny within their own party to find ways to fight back against actions by Trump in a Republican Congress that has backed him on largely all his decisions — and the initial resistance to Kaine’s idea reveals more about that struggle. Although leadership at first questioned whether votes like this would divide their own caucus and whether it was what they should be focusing on, now they’ve taken to it, Kaine said. Democrats got four Republicans to buck Trump and pass a Kaine-led measure last month on Canada tariffs.
“Now my leadership really likes the privilege motion strategy,” he said. “Whether it’s on trade or human rights reports or others, we just have to keep grabbing the floor as the minority using these tools and forcing votes.”
But this week offered a hurdle to that method. Senators forced a vote on a resolution to repeal Trump’s global tariffs. Democrats would have won that vote but lost because of two absences of senators who would’ve voted in favor. Republicans then used a procedural motion to effectively kill the measure, which required Vice President JD Vance to cast the tie-breaking vote. Some have criticized leadership for the timing.
“It was a win-win either way,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said, defending the timing of the vote. “We knew if we lost that every single Republican, including those up for election, was the single vote that kept tariffs, kept these onerous tariffs on the backs of the American people and so Republicans own it.”
Democrats are hoping to use any price hikes against Republicans and Trump as polls show many Americans oppose the tariffs. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who led on the tariff measure that was rejected this week, said after the vote that Democrats are going to continue to “pull out all the stops” to uproot the policy.
The Trump administration recently placed a 90-day pause on some higher tariffs, while hiking the duties on China, as his administration says they are working to negotiate deals. Kaine said Democrats can bring votes back six months after the emergency was announced and he’s looking at how he can force Congress to review trade deals as the Trump administration works to secure them.
“I’m going to use this privileged motion strategy anytime I can to challenge what I think is executive overreach,” Kaine said. “Never fear, there’s going to be more opportunities.”