If Hawley really wants to help workers, he’ll keep companies from going bankrupt | Opinion

Well here’s a good thing: This week, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley reintroduced the Protecting Employees and Retirees in Business Bankruptcies Act, along with his Democratic Illinois counterpart Dick Durbin. The bill aims to help employees whose companies are facing bankruptcy keep more of their wages, benefits and retirement savings if the place they work goes under.

“Employees shouldn’t be the ones left holding the bag,” Hawley said in a statement. “Rather than giving precedence to the desires of predatory creditors, we should prioritize workers and protect the compensation they’ve earned through years of hard work.” This is a fine piece of legislation, and we’re all for it.

But this would be an even better thing: Our Sen. Hawley could help working people even more by preventing the companies who employ them from going into bankruptcy in the first place.

And he could do that by standing in opposition to Donald Trump’s inflationary, market-crashing and job-killing tariffs, which many small business owners are saying will without any question sink them.

Made in USA not so easy

Trump has said these tariffs will make him “legendary,” and that we do not dispute.

But he says that’s because both American and foreign companies will rush to make their goods here. Of course, what any business considering such an investment wants most of all is stability and predictability, and those words don’t go in the same sentence with the words “Donald Trump.”

Who will pay? We all will, and already are. But small businesses, with their thin margins, can’t easily switch their supply chains or build new local manufacturing plants, because labor here costs so much more.

Many small businesses will fail as a result.

Trump may indeed back down, and then go forward, and then back down again, and then say, as he did this week, after doing enormous damage to our economy, that this was the plan all along. His brand is not consistency, but chaos, and that’s not going to change.

But you know who could keep him from wrecking our economy? The same Josh Hawley who purports to care so much for the little guy.

Congressional powers

All Congress has to do is take back its rightful power to set tariffs. All Sen. Hawley — and Eric Schmitt, also of Missouri, and Roger Marshall of Kansas — have to do to save all the small businesses that will otherwise go under is join seven of their fellow Republican senators in doing the right thing.

Those who are ready to prevent further disaster, at least on this one significant matter, include Jerry Moran of Kansas, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Todd Young of Indiana and Susan Collins of Maine. They all support the Trade Review Act of 2025 put forward by Democratic Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell and Grassley. It would require Congress to approve the president’s tariffs on trading partners.

Tillis, who is considered a vulnerable incumbent, said, “It just seems like we’ve decided to begin a trade war on all fronts — and that’s OK, if the person who thought this through has an answer for why you go after partners that we have a very long, storied relationship with.” The person doesn’t.

After Trump announced the 90-day pause on some tariffs, Tillis rightly noted that just a break in the action for some, but not China, “doesn’t do much for certainty,” either. How could he tell a CEO looking to relocate to feel comfortable investing right now, he asked “when you don’t know what the long term cost is going to be and the tax environment?”

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has also joined with Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon on a separate effort, a resolution to repeal the president’s tariffs by eliminating the emergency declaration used by Trump to put the taxes in place.

“The whole debate is so fundamentally backwards and upside down,” Paul told CNBC. “It’s based on a fallacy, and the fallacy is this: That somehow in a trade someone must lose. That somehow, when you trade with someone, there’s a loser and someone’s taking advantage of you and China is ripping you off or Japan is ripping you off. It’s absolutely a fallacy. Every trade that occurs in the marketplace is mutually beneficial.”

The perpetually aggrieved president, who though born into wealth and privilege focuses constantly on how he is supposedly being ripped off, seems to be hostage to his own beliefs that we are ripped off by everybody, and that tariffs are the solution. Economists do not share these views.

And those Senate Republicans who know better and are simply too cowardly to stand up to the president on either the economy or the rule of law will have everything to answer for if they fail to do their job.

This story was originally published April 11, 2025 at 10:46 AM.