(Just The News)—Democrats promised voters they would end President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The arithmetic says they cannot do it without Republican help.
Democrats won control of both chambers during Tuesday’s midterm elections, winning at least 54 Senate seats and a House majority with dozens of races still uncalled, according to The Center Square reporting. Overriding a presidential veto takes 67 votes in the Senate and 290 in the House. No outcome in the remaining contests gets Democrats there.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who is in line to chair the Senate Finance Committee, said he would use the panel to “reassert congressional authority over our country’s trade policy to bring down costs, end Trump’s disastrous and corrupt tariffs, reestablish critical trade partnerships, and hold trade cheats accountable.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who announced his bid for speaker Wednesday, said at a Nov. 4 news conference that Democrats would move early on ending the tariffs. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the same day that his party’s priority is “reducing costs, ending corruption.” Neither has said what would replace the revenue.
Schumer introduced the End Trump’s Tariff Tax Act, S.5390, on Sept. 14. The bill would terminate and refund duties the president imposed, according to its official title, and Schumer’s office says it covers the Section 301 tariffs on 60 countries, the Section 122 global tariffs and the 50% tariffs on Canadian goods. It has 29 cosponsors, including Wyden. It was referred to the Finance Committee that day and has not moved since.
Net customs duties totaled $173.2 billion in fiscal 2026, according to the Treasury Department’s monthly statement. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, estimates repealing the remaining tariffs would cost about $85.5 billion a year, or $245 per person. The Congressional Budget Office has not scored the bill, which has never had a committee vote.
The Tax Foundation estimates the tariffs will raise taxes by an average of $820 per household in 2026, using a model dated August 2026. The Budget Lab at Yale put the burden at about $1,100 in an Aug. 24 report. Both are modeled estimates of what households pay, not measures of federal revenue.
Erica York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, wrote in an Oct. 7 analysis that repealing all the tariffs imposed since 2017 would cost nearly $1.8 trillion over a decade, and that a broad-based value-added tax of 1% would raise enough to replace it. She wrote that the swap would not significantly change who bears the tax burden, and that it would leave the government $130.1 billion ahead over a decade once economic growth is counted.
Refunds would go to the companies that paid the duties, not to the shoppers who absorbed them in higher prices. That is what happened after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the earlier tariffs in February in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump. The government collected $317.8 billion in customs duties in fiscal 2026 and returned $144.6 billion to importers, according to the Treasury statement.
Phillip Magness, an economist at the Independent Institute and co-author of a paper tracking the administration’s shifts between tariff statutes, said refunds go to the importing company.
“They are not required to pass them along to consumers, even though consumers incurred the tariff’s incidence from higher prices,” he told The Center Square.
A challenge to the Section 301 tariffs, which USTR says cover 60 economies, is pending before the U.S. Court of International Trade. Magness said the courts remain “the most likely route by which they could be unwound or repealed before the next administration.”
USTR opened a Section 301 investigation into foreign excess manufacturing capacity in March, took public comments through April and held four days of hearings in May. The agency has posted nothing on the docket since, and it could impose new tariffs on top of the ones Democrats want to repeal. USTR did not respond to questions about whether a determination is coming. In October, the agency referred questions about its tariff authorities to the White House.
Jeffries was asked at a Nov. 4 news conference whether the tariff vote would come in the first days or first week, whether he expected Republicans to help against a veto and whether an override was possible.
“We’re going to have a conversation as a caucus upon our return about what the agenda looks like, but we’re going to get out of the gate fast,” he said. He did not address the veto.
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., the incoming Democratic caucus chair, said at the same news conference that Democrats “will pass a bill to stop the stupid Trump tariffs jacking up prices on Americans.”
Neither Wyden’s office nor Schumer’s answered questions about how they would get past Trump’s veto, or what would replace the revenue.
U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who sits on the Ways and Means trade subcommittee and told The Center Square last month that discussions on how to address the 301 tariffs were “ongoing,” did not respond to follow-up questions this week.
U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who urged U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in an Aug. 16 letter to weigh the cost of 50% tariffs on Canadian de-icing salt to Kansas taxpayers, did not respond to questions about whether he wants the tariffs gone, whether the revenue should be replaced, or whether Congress should take back the tariff authority it has delegated.
Congress returns Nov. 9. The new Congress is seated Jan. 3.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
