Kaine blasts Trump’s Iran war, unveils bill to roll back new tariffs

"U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine is tying President Donald Trump’s expanding conflict with Iran to pocketbook pain at home as he and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) push new legislation to roll back the president’s latest tariffs.

On a call with Virginia reporters Monday, Kaine again called Trump’s campaign against Iran 'illegal and an absolutely horrible idea,' arguing the White House has never secured authorization from Congress or made a clear public case for the war. He said the decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal made diplomacy “impossible” and raised the odds of conflict, a prediction he and others made at the time.

Kaine, a member of the Armed Services Committee and the father of a Marine, said Virginia families are already feeling the effects. Sailors aboard the Norfolk-based USS Gerald R. Ford have watched their deployment stretched toward record length, he noted, and rising oil prices linked to instability in the region are pushing up gas and energy costs.

At the same time, Kaine said, Trump is 'taxing Americans' through broad import duties that raise prices on everyday goods. After the Supreme Court struck down his earlier tariffs under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, Trump turned to Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act to impose a 10 percent tariff on most imported products and has signaled he wants to increase the rate to 15 percent.

Kaine and Warnock on Tuesday unveiled the Reclaim Trade Powers Act, which would repeal Section 122 and refund the tariffs collected under it. Section 122 was written in the 1970s, when the dollar was still linked to gold and fixed exchange rates, as a tool to respond quickly if foreign central banks threatened to drain U.S. reserves. The U.S. abandoned that system decades ago, and the senators argue the provision is now obsolete and ill-suited to modern trade disputes."