Democratic senators plan on Wednesday to force a vote on a measure that would block President Trump’s tariffs on Canada, hoping enough of their Republican colleagues will join them to pass a resolution that calls for halting levies set to take effect this week.
The measure would face long odds in the House, where G.O.P. leaders have moved preemptively to shut down any move to end Mr. Trump’s tariffs. But Senate passage would send a powerful bipartisan signal of congressional opposition to the president’s trade war.
The resolution targets the emergency powers Mr. Trump invoked in February to impose sweeping tariffs on Canada, a move that has rattled markets and drawn bipartisan criticism from lawmakers concerned about the economic impact on their states and districts.
Mr. Trump imposed the tariffs in an executive order that cited the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, a Cold War-era law that has most often been used to impose sanctions on rogue states and human rights violators. The administration argued that unchecked drug trafficking from Canada constituted a dire threat to American national security and used it as justification to unilaterally impose 25 percent tariffs on America’s closest trading partner.
“The president has justified the imposition of these tariffs on, in my view, a made-up emergency,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia and the lead sponsor of the resolution. “The fentanyl emergency is from Mexico and China. It’s not from Canada.”
The resolution, cosponsored by fellow Democratic Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, seeks to revoke the emergency declaration and, with it, Mr. Trump’s ability to enforce the tariffs set to go into effect on Wednesday.
Senator Rand Paul, Republican from Kentucky, is the lone Republican sponsor of the resolution, though the measure appears to have drawn interest from some other G.O.P. senators who have expressed unease about the potential economic consequences of Mr. Trump’s trade measures. The resolution could pass if four Republicans join all Democrats and independents in supporting it.
Mr. Trump on Tuesday attacked the move in a social media post and urged Republicans in the Senate to vote against the resolution. “Vote to keep the National Emergency in place, so we can finish the job, and end the scourge,” Mr. Trump wrote in the post, saying Democratic “weakness” had failed to stop fentanyl from entering the United States from the north. “The Republicans and I have reversed that course, strongly and quickly,” he wrote. “Major additional progress is being made.”
Should the Senate approve the resolution, it would move to the House, where Republican leaders have more control over its fate. House leaders moved quietly last month to cede their chamber’s power to force a vote on ending the tariffs, meaning that unless Republicans in control of the chamber opt to bring up such a measure, no lawmaker in either party could insist on such action.
“We’re not asking for the whole world to change,” Mr. Warner said during a news conference on Tuesday. “We’re asking for four Republican senators to actually go on record what they’ve all said privately: They are aghast at the tariffs. They are aghast at the economic turmoil.”
“You can’t be silent,” he added. “Silence leads to more of this.”
