President Trump did what no other Republican President has done since WW2.

He FINALLY brought the Republican Party back to its roots. The GOP is finally the part of Abraham Lincoln once again. The party that champions American workers and American Industry. The party that stands with tariff men, who stand on a tariff platform.

John Cornyn and Thomas Massie were disloyal, impotent opponents to the President, and used their platforms to oppose the Presidents prosperity agenda. Tariffs make America strong. Tariffs are what Made America Great. And tariffs are the fundamental pillar of what made the Republican Party the dominant party during the period in which the United States became a world power. Thus fundamentally, Massie and Cornyn were not just enemies of MAGA, but enemies of the Republican Party itself.

The Republican Party is the historical home of workers and industry, and the historical home of Protection….

“In the days of Henry Clay, I was a Henry Clay tariff man, and my views have undergone no material change on that subject.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 1860

“I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 1832 campaign statement

“Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth.”
— Abraham Lincoln (1847 attribution)

“It has always been a fundamental principle of the Republican Party that this market should be reserved in the first instance for the consumption of our domestic products… Our only defense… is through a protective tariff.”
— Calvin Coolidge

“The Republican party is wedded to the doctrine of protection and was never more earnest in its support and advocacy than now.”
— William McKinley, Letter Accepting the Republican Presidential Nomination (1896)

Hopefully, the Massies and Cornyn’s of the world have learned their lesson.

Finally, with President Trumps leadership, we are the party of PROTECTION once again!

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Today, Texas Republicans will decide whether John Cornyn will have the opportunity to return to the Senate for a fifth term. Over the past 23 years, Cornyn has been one of the fiercest advocates for free trade in the upper chamber, and has made it part of his agenda to dismantle the protection that built American industry and now sustains the American worker.

For instance, in April of last year, barely a fortnight after President Trump’s decisive action on Liberation Day, Senator Cornyn sat down with his local ABC News affiliate in Dallas and explained how hopeful he was that the 90-day pause on tariffs would give space to “negotiate, hopefully what amounts to zero tariffs.” He went further: “If we can get an opportunity to get to zero [tariffs] – to me that’s the goal.”

Perhaps you think this is a one-off. John Cornyn is not hiding what he is truly about. Later that same month, on CBS News Texas, Cornyn stated: “Ultimately, I think the goal should be zero tariffs, especially between friends and allies.” Zero tariffs? In the early days of the Republic, even most free traders recognized the need for some tariffs, even at low rates, as a means of raising government revenues and funding the federal establishment. Cornyn, by embracing a call for zero tariffs, is doing more than rejecting the historic engine of American development. He is pursuing a policy that is deliberately destructive of American industry, a policy that delivered us the China Shock, the post-1980 collapse of labor’s share of national income, and the fentanyl-saturated wreckage of communities across our nation.

This is not a man who has reluctantly come around to President Trump’s trade agenda. This is a man waiting it out, hoping that the next President will once again abandon American workers and industry, and embrace a vision of “free trade” that results in the devastation of our national security and the uplift of the Chinese Communist Party.

A Record, Not a Rumor

Senator Cornyn’s free trade convictions are not new and not subtle. In November 2016, after Donald Trump shocked the political establishment with the greatest political upset in modern American history, Cornyn told the Texas Tribune that he hoped “after emotions cool” the country would “take a more reasoned approach” to trade.

By a “reasoned approach,” Cornyn did not mean the American System of Protection, which built the United States into the industrial superpower it became in the twentieth century. He meant the approach that governed the Washington Consensus — the fantasy that free trade would transform nations like China into democracy-loving allies, eager to partner with the United States in spreading peace, love, and prosperity around the globe. Cornyn lamented that without voices “explaining the benefits of trade for everybody,” the “more shrill, less responsible voices” would fill the vacuum.

Translation: the voters who elected Donald Trump on a protectionist platform were shrill and irresponsible.

Cornyn’s record of selling out American workers and industry does not stop with his open-borders policy on trade. It extends to his open-borders policy on illegal immigration. In January 2017, when the first Trump administration floated a border adjustment tax to help fund the border wall, Cornyn led the Senate skepticism. He told reporters he had “concerns” and warned that a refiner had told him gasoline prices might rise by 30 cents. Cornyn was named in trade press as a key Senate obstacle to the proposal. The border adjustment tax died. The wall did not get built that term. The trade deficit with Mexico kept growing.

In March 2018, when President Trump invoked Section 232 to impose steel and aluminum tariffs to protect strategic American industry, Cornyn’s contribution to the national conversation was this: “My constituents are worried about the cost of their beer cans. It’s a concern.” A trade subcommittee leader from a state that produces steel, oil, and beef reduced the case for industrial protection to the price of aluminum cans on a Texas porch. It is the kind of unserious objection that defines a worldview.

In November 2022, as ranking member of the Finance Committee’s trade subcommittee, Cornyn went further still. He used his platform to advocate that the United States join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership — the multilateral free trade pact that President Trump had wisely withdrawn the United States from in his first term. Three years ago, with USMCA freshly negotiated and the limitations of the old order increasingly clear, the senior senator from Texas was working to drag America back into the same trap.

Cornyn continued to hedge his bets on a post-Trump, open-borders Republican Party deep into 2024. While campaigning to replace Senator McConnell as Senate GOP leader last August, Cornyn told Axios that across-the-board tariffs were “problematic.” This was three months before the election in which the American people would once again elect President Trump on a mandate explicitly built on across-the-board tariffs.

Beyond standing against tariffs, Cornyn did not even have the decency to present a unified face for our country and the administration in early February 2025, when President Trump issued the first round of tariffs against Mexico, Canada, and China. There is a saying in Washington that “politics stops at the water’s edge” — that bickering should end and political leaders should present a united front when dealing with international relations, national security, and foreign policy. At this critical moment, Cornyn told the Texas Tribune: “It’s a little hard to separate the negotiation tactics from reality. There comes a point at which tariffs add cost to consumers.”

Beyond the reality that this is the standard caricature, recited from memory, the kind of objection that does not survive critical or long-sighted examination, his unwillingness to stand united with the President and our country at such a critical moment reflects his unwillingness to be a representative of America rather than a representative of an ideology. A senior senator from the President’s own party should never act this way on the very day that a signature economic policy of the President takes effect.

The Chairman Who Will Not Lead

All of this matters more, not less, because of what John Cornyn does in the Senate today. He is not merely a member of the Senate Finance Committee. In the 119th Congress, Senator Cornyn serves as the Chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness — the single Senate subcommittee with primary jurisdiction over American trade policy. He is also one of five Republican senators designated as a Congressional Trade Advisor on Trade Policy and Negotiations.

The trade gavel is in his hand. And he has used it to call for zero tariffs.

This is no small matter. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc. that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The IEEPA tariffs — the reciprocal architecture announced on Liberation Day, the fentanyl tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China — terminated four days later. The legal foundation of the most ambitious restructuring of American trade policy since the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 was knocked out from under it.

What was the response from the chairman of the Senate’s trade subcommittee? Not a bill granting the President clear statutory tariff authority. Not legislation cementing the reciprocal structure into law. Not a meaningful response to the currency manipulation, transshipment, and forced technology transfer that the President’s tariffs were designed to combat. Instead: hearings about Australian non-tariff barriers to Texas beef exports, where the very first move by Cornyn at USTR Greer’s April 2025 testimony was to pivot the conversation from American producer protection to foreign market access for American exporters. The first frame leads to “zero tariffs.” The second frame leads to the American System. Cornyn knows the difference. He chose the first frame on purpose.

Henry Clay understood the difference. Henry Carey understood the difference. E. Peshine Smith, whose Manual of Political Economy laid out the doctrine that powered post-Civil War American industrialization, understood the difference. The protective tariff was never primarily about prying open foreign markets for American exports. The protective tariff was about building the integrated domestic economy that made American workers the most productive on earth. Cornyn’s framework — reciprocity as a path to zero — inverts this entirely. It treats the American market as a bargaining chip to be traded away rather than as a strategic asset to be defended.

The Senate Finance Committee was where the protective tariffs of 1861, 1890, and 1922 were built. It is where they are being slowly suffocated today, with John Cornyn as one of the senior morticians.

The Choice

Ken Paxton has not written a treatise on the American System. He is not, as far as anyone has documented, a student of Henry Carey or Friedrich List. But he is a man who understands what time it is. He understands that the President’s trade agenda is the most important domestic policy initiative in two generations, and he is running to defend it without reservation, without “reciprocity-toward-zero” caveats, and without one foot already out the door waiting for the political climate to cool.

That matters. The next six years will determine whether the protective turn becomes the new American consensus or a brief Trump-era interlude before the Cornyns of the world reassert control. Texas Republicans have the chance today to send a senator who will fight for the agenda, not slow-walk it from the chairmanship of the very subcommittee where the agenda will live or die.

The Republican Party of Henry Clay was built on protection. The Republican Party of John Cornyn has spent forty years apologizing for it. The choice on the ballot today is, in a small way, the choice between those two parties.

Get to zero, John Cornyn said. The voters should answer in kind.

The vast majority of people, even those who claim to champion the tariff, continue to misunderstand not just our President, but the tariff. Many are bewildered at President Trump for his recent trip to China. How can Trump be so adamant about using tariffs, but then seem so friendly to Xi Jinping? After 10 years of Trump being at the forefront of our politics, it’s shocking that so many still have yet to fully understand what “peace through strength” really means, and how tariffs fit into the President’s agenda.

Tariffs are NOT a weapon. Tariffs are NOT a way to seek vengeance. Protectionists do not advocate for tariffs because of their offensive capabilities. Since President Washington signed the first tariff bill, literally on July 4th, 1789, the tariff has been wielded for an explicit, definitive purpose: the defense of American labor and industry. Protectionists protect. They occupy an inherently defensive position.

But a defensive posture is not a passive one. The credible strength to defend American industry is precisely what deters predation against it — and deterrence, not appeasement, is what produces peace. The reason the President has taken such a strong approach to tariffing Chinese goods is not because he seeks to destroy the Chinese, but precisely because he wishes to protect American labor and industry. Secretary Rubio articulates this strategy clearly—

“Their rise cannot come at our expense. Their rise cannot come at our fall... When [China’s] plan is in conflict with the national interest of the United States, we need to do what’s right for the United States.”

China has belligerently attacked the United States in nearly all fashions but direct kinetic force. From constant cyberattacks, systemic theft of intellectual property, a total mishandling of Covid, to a deliberate Communist industrial policy plan that aims at making not just the United States, but the world, dependent on a party seeking global hegemony; the Chinese have done incalculable damage to the American people and to western civilization as a whole. And yet President Donald J. Trump did not ride down the golden escalator in 2015 to crush China. Nor did he survive multiple assassination attempts to end the Chinese Communist Party. President Trump ran for office because he saw what was happening to our beautiful country, and wanted to protect and defend the American people.

Look at the President’s phenomenal relationship with Japan, including the late Shinzo Abe, and now Sanae Takaichi. Do you realize that the first time President Trump advocated publicly for tariffs was over 40 years ago, when he chastised Japan and called for the defense of American industry against Japanese dumping? Do you think President Trump did this because he wanted to crush the Japanese? Do you think President Trump wanted to use tariffs to destroy them? No, President Trump advocated for tariffs then, as he does now, not for the destruction of foreign competitors, but for the protection of the American people.

Unlike the Communist Party, the industrial goals of Protectionists are not to subjugate the world to a totalitarian vision. Protectionists have no ill will toward the people of China nor the rest of the world. Our goal is simple: the protection of American workers and industry, the development of the home market, and a higher quality of life for all our people.

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A year ago today, on April 2, 2025, Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden and did something no president had dared to do in nearly a century.

The tariffs announced on what the President rightly called Liberation Day struck back against five decades of slow, deliberate hollowing-out of American manufacturing, produced by free trade.

Since then, the President’s tariffs have been contested in their legal architecture, and met with the predictable howls of a Washington commentariat that has not built a factory or carried a shift in its life. But all of the resistance, and the many setbacks, have yet to change what Liberation Day actually was.

Liberation Day was the most consequential act of economic statecraft in over a hundred years. Thanks to President Trump, a door has opened for Protectionists that the enemies of the American system had sealed shut. Finally, on the 250th anniversary of the country’s Declaration of Independence, tariffs have retaken their rightful place as a key ingredient for American statecraft.

We have reason both to celebrate and to demand more. The President delivered a paradigm shift, but the Congress has yet to deliver.

The Good

Let’s begin with what has been won.

In the months following Liberation Day, companies announced more than $1.7 trillion in new American manufacturing commitments including semiconductor fabs in Arizona and Texas, pharmaceutical plants across the South, battery facilities in Tennessee, glass and component lines from Kentucky to California.

Apple alone has pledged $600 billion in domestic investment over four years. TSMC, the world’s most advanced chipmaker, committed $165 billion to its Arizona expansion — the largest single foreign direct investment in American history. IBM pledged $150 billion. Micron, $200 billion. Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson together committed tens of billions more to domestic pharmaceutical production.

These historic investments make it clear that manufacturers are voting with their capital on a simple proposition: that America is open for production again. Tariff revenue reached $264 billion in the 2025 calendar year — nearly five times the prior year’s total. Manufacturing new orders for durable goods, capital equipment, and industrial machinery rose meaningfully in the months following Liberation Day, reversing a years-long decline.

The American Compass’s analysis of Census Bureau data showed new orders for nondefense capital goods climbing through the second half of 2025, precisely the signal that genuine reindustrialization sends. Job openings in the manufacturing sector, which had been falling steadily, halted their descent on Liberation Day and began to reverse.

And consider what was accomplished geopolitically. For decades, Americans faced what might be called the long surrender. A Giant Sucking Sound in which American workers saw their jobs move toward countries with state-subsidized competitors and, in the case of China, documented forced labor that no American company could legally replicate at home.

That era is gone, President Trump ended it. No future administration will be able to pretend that free trade is a neutral policy. That is a civilizational achievement.

The Bad

And yet, the investment pledges, however enormous, have not fully translated into factories on the ground, because capital does not move toward uncertainty. The source of that uncertainty is not the President’s ambition but instead the absence of a Congress willing to match it.

In February, the Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs, on the grounds that a tariff is a tax, and the taxing power belongs to Congress. The decision was legally debatable. IEEPA explicitly grants the President broad authority to regulate and restrict foreign commerce in response to national emergencies — and the notion that Congress, in drafting that language, intended to exclude the most ancient and effective tool of commercial statecraft strains credulity.

Tariffs are not merely taxes. They are instruments of statecraft, increasingly critical to national defense. The President’s lawyers argued as much, and they were not wrong.

But the Court drew its line, and we must reckon with what that line reveals. A great President and a determined executive branch are not, by themselves, enough.

The President used every tool available to him. He was bold where his predecessors were timid, clear-eyed where they were credulous, and willing to absorb enormous political cost in defense of the American manufacturer. And still, the architecture was not there to sustain what he built.

That is the deeper scandal: not the Court’s ruling, but what the ruling exposed. The President should not have had to govern trade policy through emergency declarations. He did so because Congress abdicated.

For decades, the legislature quietly surrendered its tariff authority to international agreements, to executive branch deference, to the soft pressure of a free-trade donor class that had no interest in seeing protection institutionalized in law. The result was a President fighting with one hand, improvising what a generation of protectionist legislators should have already built.

That generation does not yet exist in sufficient numbers. Building it in the Congress, in the committee staffs, in the think tanks and law schools that feed the legislature is the work of a decade, and the raison d'être for The American Protective Tariff League. Congress must step up to meet the President.

The Way Forward

What should Congress do?

The answer is clear, and it has precedent going back to the founding of the Republic.

1. Codify Liberation Day

First, Congress must codify the Liberation Day tariff structure in law. The reciprocal framework the President announced is sound policy: a universal floor rate applied for revenue, with higher protective rates for nations that undercut American business and maintain systematic barriers against American exports. It is also precisely the kind of policy that should have been in the United States Code from the beginning. Congress's decades of abdication on tariff policy forced the President to pursue economic sovereignty through executive order.

Thus, Congress should pass permanent legislation establishing the rate structure, with appropriate authority for the executive to negotiate modifications within defined bands. That predictability is what turns a trillion dollars in investment pledges into factories on American soil.

2. Create a New Tariff Schedule

Second, Congress must reform the Harmonized Tariff Schedule itself. The current schedule is a monument to the free-trade consensus designed to minimize friction, not to protect industry.

A reformed schedule should include both specific duties and ad valorem rates, structured not merely for revenue but explicitly for protection.

This is how Hamilton designed the original system in his Report on Manufactures. It is how Alexander Dallas, facing a Treasury hollowed out by war, used the tariff to rebuild American solvency and lay the ground for Clay's American System. It is how the McKinley Tariff worked. Specific duties protect against foreign dumping and currency manipulation in ways that percentage rates cannot.

A combined system, thoughtfully designed, can protect the infant industries of the twenty-first century — semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing, clean energy equipment — in the same way that the Morrill Tariff of 1861 protected the industries of its own age.

3. Direct Revenue toward Internal Improvements

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Congress must direct the revenue.

In 1817, John C. Calhoun introduced the Bonus Bill, which would have directed the bonus paid by the Second Bank of the United States toward a permanent fund for internal improvements: roads, canals, harbors, the physical infrastructure of a continental economy. James Madison, who had given an inaugural speech supporting and promoting this kind of bill, made a perplexing decision on the final day of his Presidency to veto the bill.

Henry Clay spent the next three decades trying to revive the principle: that tariff revenue and the national bank’s resources ought to be directed toward the infrastructure that would make American manufacturing competitive. The Erie Canal was built and railroads followed. But the systematic connection between protective revenue and internal investment was never fully institutionalized at the federal level.

Now is the time to make that connection permanent. The tariff revenue flowing into the Treasury — $264 billion in 2025 alone — should not simply disappear into the general fund.

Congress should establish a dedicated Infrastructure and Reindustrialization Account, funded by a defined portion of customs duties, directed toward the physical investments that make domestic manufacturing possible: ports, roads, rail corridors, energy infrastructure, and the workforce training programs that will staff the new factories.

This is not pork barrel spending. It is the proper direction of revenue that would not exist without the protective system that generated it.

Madison vetoed the Bonus Bill on his last day in office because he believed Congress had not yet authorized the use of those particular funds for that particular purpose. Congress today needs no such authorization. The purse is theirs. The revenue is real. The only thing missing is the will to direct it toward Reindustrialization.

The American System of the 21st Century

The President has done the hard political work. He demonstrated that the American people would support a robust national economic policy. He made clear that the free-trade consensus was a creation of donor-class opinion, not popular will. He proved that manufacturing communities respond to a president who fights for them. He broke the intellectual spell.

What he has handed Congress is not merely a political mandate. It is a blueprint. The outlines of the American System of the twenty-first century are already visible in what the President’s tariffs set in motion — and what a determined legislature could now make permanent.

Imagine a Harmonized Tariff Schedule rebuilt from the ground up by protectionists rather than free traders — one that defends semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, steel, and advanced manufacturing with the same deliberateness that the Morrill Tariff once defended iron and wool. Imagine a reciprocal tariff framework enshrined in statute, giving the executive the flexibility to negotiate and respond while guaranteeing American industry the long-term certainty it needs to invest. Imagine tariff revenue — $264 billion in a single year — directed not into the general fund but into a dedicated infrastructure account, funding the ports, rail corridors, energy grid, and workforce training programs that will make the new factories viable for generations.

This is not a fantasy. It is precisely what Hamilton proposed in his Report on Manufactures, what Clay fought for across thirty years in the Senate, and what Lincoln’s Congress briefly achieved with the Morrill Tariff and the Pacific Railroad Acts. The formula has always been the same: protect the industry, capture the revenue, build the infrastructure, and let the cycle repeat. America did it before. It made us the greatest manufacturing nation the world had ever seen. We can do it again.

But it requires a Congress that understands what is being asked of it. Not a Congress of caretakers content to manage decline, but one with the vision to see that the President has opened a door that protectionists have been locked out of for nearly a century — and the courage to walk through it.

What remains is the legislative work. The work of codifying the revolution so that it outlasts any single administration. The work of building a tariff schedule worthy of Hamilton’s vision. The work of directing the revenue toward the infrastructure that Clay understood as the indispensable third leg of the American System. The work, in short, that only Congress can do.

Liberation Day was the declaration. The law has yet to be written. Congress should get to work.

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