Democrats will run the House and the Senate in January. The tariffs they campaigned against are mostly not the ones still standing, and the ones still standing are harder to undo.
Sources: Tax Foundation and Fitch (tariff rate), U.S. Treasury via the DaveManuel Tariff Revenue Tracker (duties), Tax Foundation and Yale Budget Lab (household cost). The two household figures use different methods: Tax Foundation's $820 is its estimate for 2026 based on what is actually imported, and Yale's about $1,100 assumes today's tariffs stay in place, measured at fixed import weights.
01The Main Tariffs Still Standing
Start with what is actually in force, because it is not what most people picture. The tariffs that drew the headlines in 2025, the fentanyl tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China and the Liberation Day country tariffs, are already gone. The Supreme Court struck them down 6-3 on February 20, 2026 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, ruling that the emergency powers law the administration relied on does not authorize tariffs. A temporary 10% replacement under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 ran for its legal maximum of 150 days and expired on July 24, 2026.
What is left rests on three older laws: Section 232 (national security), Section 301 (unfair trade practices) and Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. None of them needs a vote of Congress to stay in place, and Congress cannot switch any of them off by a simple majority vote. That is a limit on Congress, not on the tariffs themselves: the administration can change or suspend tariffs under these same laws, as the trade representative has done after negotiated deals, and the courts can still rule against them, as the Supreme Court did with the emergency tariffs. Click any row for the details.
| Tariff | Law | Rate | Can the new Congress end it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steel, aluminum and copper+ | Section 232 | Up to 50% | Needs a law that survives a veto |
| Can Congress end it? Congress would need a new law. Section 232 has a congressional disapproval route only for petroleum imports. National-security tariffs from the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, charged since April 2026 on the full value of goods made mostly of metal (50%) and of many derivative products (25%). Untouched by the Supreme Court ruling. | |||
| Cars, trucks and parts+ | Section 232 | 25% (15% for some deal partners); trucks 25% | Needs a law that survives a veto |
| Can Congress end it? New law needed. Deal partners such as Japan, the EU and South Korea pay 15% on cars. A 50% rate on Canadian cars and steel has been threatened for January 1, 2027, but no order had been published at the time of writing. | |||
| Furniture, cabinets and lumber+ | Section 232 | 10% lumber, 25% upholstered furniture and cabinets | Needs a law; a date is coming |
| Can Congress end it? New law needed. Rates on upholstered furniture rise to 30% and on cabinets and vanities to 50% on January 1, 2027. The increase was delayed a year by a December 2025 proclamation. | |||
| Patented drugs and some AI chips+ | Section 232 | Up to 100% on patented drugs; 25% on certain advanced chips | Needs a law that survives a veto |
| Can Congress end it? New law needed. The chip tariff covers a narrow set of advanced AI chips with wide exemptions, including chips for U.S. data centers and consumer electronics. | |||
| The country-wide tariff on 60 economies+ | Section 301 | 10% or 12.5% | Needs a law that survives a veto |
| Can Congress end it? New law needed. It has no end date. Took over the minute the temporary Section 122 tariff expired on July 24, 2026, using Section 301 findings that these economies do not bar or police imports made with forced labor. Covers about 60 economies, including the EU, Japan, China, Vietnam, India and Mexico, with exemptions for Section 232 goods and goods that qualify under the USMCA. | |||
| China+ | Section 301 | 7.5% to 100% on the older lists, plus 12.5% | Needs a law; a date is coming |
| Can Congress end it? New law needed. The trade truce with China runs to January 10, 2027. The 2018-2019 China tariffs are still in place. A batch of product exclusions and a pause on port fees for Chinese ships came up for renewal in November 2026. | |||
| Brazil+ | Section 301 | 25% | Needs a law that survives a veto |
| Can Congress end it? New law needed. Imposed in July 2026, with lists of exempted products. | |||
| Selected Canadian goods+ | Section 338 | 50% | Needs a law that survives a veto |
| Can Congress end it? New law needed. It applies even to goods that qualify under the USMCA. A power from the Tariff Act of 1930 that no president had used before. It covers about $20 billion of Canadian goods, and Canada has answered with counter-tariffs on C$27.6 billion of U.S. goods. | |||
| The emergency tariffs (IEEPA)+ | Struck down | Gone | Already over |
| Can Congress end it? Ended by the Supreme Court on February 20, 2026, not by Congress. These were the fentanyl tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China and the Liberation Day country tariffs. About $166 billion was collected and is being refunded to importers with interest. | |||
| The temporary 10% tariff+ | Section 122 | Expired | Already over |
| Can Congress end it? Ended July 24, 2026, when its 150-day limit ran out. Only an act of Congress could have extended it, and Congress did not act. It bridged the gap between the court ruling and the Section 301 tariff. | |||
Rates as listed by the Congressional Research Service (report R49481, October 2026) and trade-law firms. The table covers the main tariffs, not every action: CRS also lists smaller ones, such as duties on drone components that start February 9, 2027, and bans on some Canadian products. Look up the duty on any product and country with the U.S. Tariff Calculator.
02The Veto Arithmetic
For Congress, every tariff in that table can only be ended by a law, and the president has said what he would do with bills from a Democratic Congress. "What happens is I veto everything," Trump said in October. To override a veto, two-thirds of each chamber has to vote yes: 67 senators and 290 representatives if every seat is filled and every member votes. (The Constitution requires two-thirds of those voting, so the exact number depends on attendance.)
Democrats say they will try anyway. Hakeem Jeffries, in line to be Speaker, has pledged to "eradicate the Trump tariffs" in the first 100 days, and Richard Neal, the top Democrat on Ways and Means, says he is "committed to reversing Trump's unjustified tariffs." Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, says there is "overwhelming support" for repealing the tariffs on Canada first.
Use the slider to move a share of Republicans in each chamber over to the Democratic side and see when an override would clear. It assumes every Democrat, and every independent who caucuses with them, votes for repeal.
Senate
House
Seat counts as reported at 10 a.m. ET on November 6, 2026: Senate 54 Democrats (including independents who caucus with them), 44 Republicans, 2 uncalled; House 253 Democrats, 157 Republicans, 25 uncalled. NBC News projects a final House of 258 Democrats and 177 Republicans. Final counts may differ. The projection setting uses NBC's House projection and splits the two open Senate seats. The record crossovers: five Senate Republicans on Brazil (52-48, October 28, 2025) and six House Republicans on Canada (219-211, February 11, 2026).
Those record votes were on the old emergency tariffs, and even they fell far short of two-thirds. In 2025 the Senate passed four resolutions to end the tariff emergencies, on Canada twice, on Brazil and on the global tariffs (a fifth, on the global tariffs in April, failed 49-49), and none of them became law. The Republicans who crossed were nearly always the same handful: Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul, joined by Thom Tillis on Brazil. An override now would need 11 to 13 Senate Republicans and, if NBC's House projection holds, about 32 House Republicans.
That leaves Democrats with slower tools. Appropriations bills can carry limits on how the administration spends money to enforce tariffs, and the president has to sign those to keep the government open. Committees can call officials to testify and demand documents on tariff exemptions. And bills that pass both chambers and get vetoed put every Republican on the record ahead of 2028. The Congressional Review Act, which lets Congress cancel agency rules by simple majority, does not reach presidential proclamations, which is how the Section 232 and Section 338 tariffs were imposed. Whether it reaches the trade representative's Section 301 actions has not been tested.
03The Tariff Calendar
The fight does not wait for January. These are the dates that decide what happens next. The red counters show how far away each one is from the day you are reading this.
04Follow the Money
Tariffs became real money in 2025. Customs duties went from $77 billion in fiscal 2024 to $195 billion in fiscal 2025. In fiscal 2026, which ended September 30, gross collections reached a record $317.8 billion, but $144.6 billion went back out as refunds, about $130 billion of them for the tariffs the Supreme Court struck down, so the government kept $173.2 billion, 11% less than the year before.
The chart below is built from the Treasury's monthly figures. Watch what happens in the spring of 2026: refunds were so large that net customs receipts were negative in May, June and July. In June alone the Treasury paid back $49.2 billion and took in $23.6 billion.
Monthly customs duties in billions of dollars, Monthly Treasury Statement, via the DaveManuel Tariff Revenue Tracker. Hover over or tap a bar for the month.
About $166 billion was collected under the emergency tariffs the court struck down, and Customs and Border Protection is refunding it to importers with interest. By late October about $128 billion, including interest, had been refunded. The refunds go to the companies that paid the duties, not to the shoppers who paid higher prices.
Here is the budget question Democrats will face. The Congressional Budget Office has not scored a repeal of today's tariffs. Outside estimates put the tariffs now in force at roughly $1.0 trillion to $1.4 trillion over ten years (Tax Foundation), and estimates for full repeal run as high as $2.1 trillion (Penn Wharton). That is real money in a year when the deficit was $1.99 trillion and the government spent $1.14 trillion on interest, about six and a half times what it kept from tariffs (see the national debt clock). No "tariff dividend" checks have been paid.
05Who Pays at the Border
Duties are paid by the importer, usually an American company, not by the country that makes the goods. Studies by the New York Fed, the Congressional Budget Office and the Kiel Institute find foreign exporters absorb only about 4% to 14% of the cost; the rest lands on U.S. businesses and their customers. Here is where the duties were collected in the first eight months of 2026:
Duties calculated by the Census Bureau on imports for consumption, January to August 2026: $174 billion on $2.38 trillion of imports, an average of 7.3%. Via the DaveManuel Tariff Revenue Tracker.
Imports from China still carry the most duty by far, even though it now supplies a much smaller share of what Americans buy: about 9% of U.S. imports by the end of 2025, down from about 22% in 2017 (PIIE). Trade has moved to Mexico, Vietnam and Taiwan rather than coming home; the U.S. trade deficit was $904 billion in 2024 and $902 billion in 2025.
A rollback would also scramble the trade deals of 2025. Most partners now pay less than they agreed to: the EU is capped at 10% instead of the 15% it signed up for, Japan and South Korea at 12.5%, and India at 10% instead of 18%. Their investment pledges, $550 billion from Japan and $350 billion from South Korea among them, are still on paper but mostly unspent. Canada is the exception that runs the other way: it faces the 50% Section 338 tariff and has answered with its own counter-tariffs, and in July the U.S. declined to renew the USMCA in its current form, which puts the pact on annual reviews.
06Two Hundred Years of Tariffs
Tariffs used to be the main way the federal government paid for itself, and the long record of tariff rates is mostly a record of Congress, not presidents, setting them. The line shows duties collected as a share of the value of everything imported. Tap a marker or a button for what happened at each turning point.
Duties collected as a percentage of the value of all imports. 1821-1833: Douglas Irwin (NBER working paper 9616); 1860-1890: F.W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States; 1891-2025: U.S. International Trade Commission. The series are different compilations and 1834-1859 is not shown. The DaveManuel US Tariff History page has every major tariff law since 1789.
07The Last Time This Happened
The closest parallel is more than a century old. In 1910 voters gave Democrats the House after a Republican president signed a tariff they hated. Here is how that went, set against today.
| 1910-1913 | 2026-2027 | |
|---|---|---|
| The election | 1910: Democrats win the House after 16 years in the minority. | 2026: Democrats win the House and the Senate. |
| The White House | A Republican, William Howard Taft, who had signed the Payne-Aldrich tariff. | A Republican, Donald Trump, who built his second term around tariffs. |
| The bills | Schedule-by-schedule cuts: wool, a farmers' free list, cotton, metals. | House Democrats promise a bill to end the tariffs in their first weeks; Senate Democrats name Canada first. |
| The veto | Taft vetoed five tariff bills in 1911 and 1912. | Trump in October 2026: "what happens is I veto everything." |
| The override | The House voted to override two of them in August 1912. The Senate fell short, 39-36 and 32-39. | Needs 67 senators and 290 House members. The most Republicans who crossed on the 2025-2026 tariff votes: 5 in the Senate, 6 in the House. |
| What finally worked | The 1912 election: Democrats won the White House too, and the Underwood Tariff passed in 1913. | Not yet known. Every past rollback came with a president of the same party who let it become law. |
The record on tariff vetoes is short and one-sided. I could not find a single presidential veto of a tariff bill that Congress overrode. The modern trade vetoes went the same way: Reagan's textile quota bills in 1985 and 1988 and his 1988 trade bill, which the House overrode 308-113 and the Senate did not, 61-37 (Senate veto record).
| Year | President | Tariff bill vetoed | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1842 | John Tyler | Two tariff bills | Sustained |
| 1911 | William Howard Taft | Wool, the farmers' free list, cotton | Sustained (no override reached two-thirds) |
| 1912 | William Howard Taft | Wool again, the metal schedule | House overrode both; Senate failed, 39-36 and 32-39 |
| 1921 | Woodrow Wilson | The Emergency Tariff, a tariff increase | Sustained; Harding signed it 85 days later |
| 1932 | Herbert Hoover | The Democratic House's Smoot-Hawley fix | Sustained; House override failed 178-166 |
Sources: U.S. Senate veto records, Voteview roll calls, the American Presidency Project and the U.S. House history office.
The pattern holds across more than a century. Winning the House in a midterm, as Democrats did in 1890 and 1910 when tariffs were the main issue, and again in 2018, has never been enough on its own. The big rollbacks, in 1894, 1913 and 1934, came only when the same party held the House, the Senate and the White House. The 1894 cut lasted about three years before Republicans reversed it.
08Three Ways This Goes
Pick a path to see what it means for prices, revenue and trade.
A rollback becomes law
How: enough Republicans join to override a veto, or the president signs a bill, perhaps as part of a larger deal.
Prices: households would save some of the estimated $820 to $1,100 a year, but slowly. Goldman Sachs and the New York Fed expect prices to come down gradually, if at all, because companies rarely cut prices as fast as they raise them.
Revenue: roughly $1 trillion to $2 trillion less over ten years, depending on how much is repealed.
Trade: the 2025 deals lose most of their leverage.
Stalemate
How: bills pass both chambers and are vetoed; the vetoes stand, as every tariff veto so far has.
Prices: the tariffs stay, and the January 1 increases on furniture and cabinets go ahead.
Revenue: Tax Foundation estimates about $80 billion to $110 billion for 2026; later years depend on which tariffs stay and how much is imported.
Trade: the fight moves to the courts, to spending bills and to the 2028 election.
A partial deal
How: Congress and the White House trade on a narrow piece, with Canada the most likely place to start; Republican senators from border and farm states have voted against those tariffs before.
Prices: small and targeted changes.
Revenue: a few billion a year rather than hundreds of billions.
Trade: the USMCA review and the China truce, which runs to January 10, 2027, become the bargaining table.
Household cost: Tax Foundation ($820 for 2026) and Yale Budget Lab (about $1,100 under current law). Revenue: Tax Foundation, Yale Budget Lab and the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
Sources
- Supreme Court ruling, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, February 20, 2026 (summary)
- Congressional Research Service, R49481: U.S. tariff actions, October 8, 2026
- Congressional Research Service, IF11096: the Congressional Review Act, October 14, 2026
- U.S. Trade Representative: Section 301 forced-labor tariffs on 60 economies, July 2026
- Davis Wright Tremaine: the Section 338 tariffs on Canadian goods, August 2026
- C.H. Robinson: Section 232 changes for steel, aluminum and copper, April 2026
- GHY: Section 232 tariffs on lumber, furniture, cabinets and vanities
- Federal Register: China Section 301 product exclusion extensions
- Holland and Knight: proposed extension of the China port-fee suspension, October 2026
- White and Case: the 2026 USMCA joint review
- U.S. Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement (customs duties), via the DaveManuel Tariff Revenue Tracker
- Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review, October 2026
- Tax Foundation: tracking the economic impact of the tariffs
- Yale Budget Lab: the state of U.S. tariffs (updated November 2026)
- Penn Wharton Budget Model: projected tariff revenues under current policy, July 2026
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York: who is paying for the 2025 tariffs?
- Kiel Institute: Americans pay almost entirely for the tariffs, January 2026
- Peterson Institute: five takeaways on U.S. imports in 2025
- Refunds of the struck-down tariffs, from CBP court filings
- Hakeem Jeffries: letter announcing his candidacy for Speaker, November 4, 2026
- Reuters via Yahoo: Richard Neal on reversing the tariffs, November 6, 2026
- Daily Beast, citing the Wall Street Journal: Democrats pick Canada as the first target, November 6, 2026
- Colorado Politics: Trump threatens to veto everything, October 23, 2026
- Yahoo News: midterm results live updates, November 6, 2026
- NBC Chicago: which races have not been called, November 2026
- U.S. Senate roll call votes, 119th Congress, first session
- CBS News: the House vote on the Canada tariffs, February 2026
- U.S. Senate veto record: William Howard Taft
- U.S. Senate veto record: Herbert Hoover
- U.S. Senate veto record: Woodrow Wilson
- U.S. Senate veto record: Ronald Reagan
- Voteview: House vote to override the 1912 wool veto
- Voteview: Senate vote on the 1912 wool veto
- Office of the Historian, U.S. House: party divisions
- U.S. International Trade Commission: duties collected and ratio to value, 1891-2025
- Douglas Irwin, NBER working paper 9616: average U.S. tariff estimates
- F.W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States, appendix tables.