Inu Manak on the future of North American economic integration

Okay, shifting gears a little bit.

You mentioned Congress.

Why isn't Congress doing [laughs] anything?

Good question.

And I, I mean, and I guess, you know, that could be answered in a lot of different ways, but let's say that, you know, they do do something useful in this sphere.

What would that be?

Right.

So yes, Congress has not done a lot since the tariffs have started increasing since early last year, and Canada and Mexico were the first targets of the IEEPA tariffs.

That's the International Economic Emergency Powers Act tariffs that were the first ones-

The amount of times I've had to type that out for all of the stuff that people send my way now.

I know.

I'm so sorry.

[laughs]

There's a lot of acronyms.

It's so many characters.

It's a lot of characters-

[laughs]

... and you gotta get them right.

But, you know, those tariffs were kind of a shock to a lot of trade experts.

I remember even in, like, my trade group chat, people were trying to put bets on what statute they thought the president was gonna use first, and then what countries would be targeted.

And a lot of us were like, "Wow.

Canada and Mexico? That was not on my bingo card." Um, so it was a bit of a surprise to see that, and then also a surprise that there wasn't, like, a big reaction, right? And what we've seen over the last year and at some change has been, you know, Congress not really doing much yet on this.

Now, many reasons for this.

One, if you look at the composition of Congress, we have a Republican majority.

The president's a Republican.