Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) attend a Rose Garden Club lunch, hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 21, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
On September 18, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) introduced a resolution that calls for blocking President Donald Trump's 50 percent tariff on Brazil. And when the resolution came up for a vote on Tuesday night, October 28, it passed the U.S. Senate in a 52-48 vote.
Most of the "yea" votes came from Democrats, but five Republicans voted "yea" as well: Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky, Maine's Susan Collins, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, and North Carolina's Thom Tillis.
MSNBC's Steve Benen, in an October 29 column, cites that vote as a rare example of a Trump policy getting a bipartisan "rebuke."
"To recap briefly," Benen explains, "Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on Brazil in July, not to address a trade deficit — the U.S. actually has a $7.4 billion trade surplus with Brazil — but because Brazil's criminal justice system was pursuing a case against former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom Trump likes. The move marked the first time a U.S. administration tried to leverage trade policy to derail a criminal case in a sovereign nation….. Three months later, a bipartisan Senate majority voted to reject the Republican's gambit."
The fact that five Senate Republicans voted "yea" on a resolution introduced by Democrat Kaine, Benen emphasizes, is not insignificant.
"There will be some who look at the vote total and scoff: There are 53 Senate Republicans, and 48 of them chose to go along with a White House trade policy that's ridiculous on its face," Benen argues. "Asked before the vote why more of his GOP colleagues were not willing to support the measure, Paul told The New York Times, 'Fear.' But I prefer to see the glass as half-full. In April, when a narrow, bipartisan majority in the Senate rejected Trump's tariffs on Canada, a Politico report summarized it as 'the most significant rebuke to Trump that congressional Republicans have yet mustered in his second term.' And now, it's happened again."
The "Rachel Maddow Show" producer continues, "Indeed, since the vote in April advanced with 51 votes, the vote on the Brazil policy is arguably an even more significant rebuke, since it passed with a slightly larger majority…. The bad news is that the practical implications of the developments are likely to be limited: The measure now heads to the Republican-led House, which no longer does any work and is all but certain to ignore the resolution, even when it eventually returns."
Steve Benen's full MSNBC column is available at this link.