Barrett tells telephone town hall he’s ‘not ready to give up’ on Trump tariffs 

BY ANDREW ROTH, MICHIGAN ADVANCE

MICHIGAN—US Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Charlotte) said Monday that he is “not ready to give up” on tariffs issued by President Donald Trump “at this point” after a third day of global markets plummeting.

The freshman member of Congress said during a telephone town hall that the stock market “isn’t the entire American economy.”

“It’s an indicator of how our economy is doing, but it’s not reflective of the entire economy as a whole,” Barrett said.

He pointed to the U.S. adding 228,000 jobs in March, exceeding expectations, as an example.

Barrett said he is monitoring the situation and will “make sure we are doing everything we can to stabilize the market and ensure consumers don’t experience long-term pain.”

More than 5,000 people joined the call, Barrett’s office said, and he took questions on topics ranging from his support of a bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of a Signal group chat that unintentionally included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to communicate about plans to bomb Yemen.

While a constituent urged Barrett to vote against the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE, the congressman said that not requiring proof of citizenship “discounts your vote or my vote from counting as an effective tool.”

A review by the Michigan Secretary of State’s office identified 15 individuals who allegedly cast ballots in the November presidential election despite not being U.S. citizens, representing less than 0.0003% of the 5.7 million ballots cast.

But Barrett pointed to Rep. Marianne Miller-Meeks, an Iowa congresswoman who won her election in 2020 by six votes, to explain why it is problematic for even a small number of potentially illegal ballots to be cast.

“That can make or break an entire race for the U.S. Congress, and there have been multiple bills that have passed on the floor of Congress by one vote this term alone,” Barrett said. “So six votes in one district can affect the outcome of that election, and that one vote in the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate could affect the entire trajectory of legislation in this country.”

But while another SAVE Plan—former President Joe Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education repayment plan for student loan borrowers—makes its way through the courts, one caller expressed concern about whether the Trump administration could place limits on Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a program that promises student loan forgiveness for any borrower who spends 10 years working in the public sector.

Barrett said that any changes to the program would have to be implemented in such a way that anyone currently on their way to loan forgiveness under the plan, signed into law by former President George Bush, would be held harmless.

“We want to make sure that people who are in the midst of that program and have modified their decision making about a career field are not seeing that taken away midstream,” Barrett said. “Nor do we want to see it retroactively taken away from people whose loan was forgiven because, of course, they’ve now made financial decisions based upon that.”

Responding to a question about the federal deficit and plans to extend the 2017 tax cuts, Barrett said that “at the end of the day, we have to be prepared to make tough decisions to streamline our government agencies and hopefully save us money and deliver better government assistance to people who need it most by protecting programs that really are critical.”

READ MORE: Trump announces sweeping new tariffs to promote US manufacturing, risking inflation and trade wars

This coverage was republished from Michigan Advance pursuant to a Creative Commons license.