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MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow went after congressional Republicans for quietly barreling forward with a tactic that effectively hands President Donald Trump their power to rescind his tariff policies on a silver platter.

The host devoted her opening monologue on Tuesday to a Republican plan to cede their ability under the National Emergencies Act to end Trump’s tariffs, which Maddow said are causing the American public and businesses across the nation “very real pain and loss of money.”

“So Republicans in Congress have the power to stop Trump from doing what he's doing on tariffs,” Maddow said. “What will they do with that power? The Democrats are going to force them to take a vote on this."

“They’re literally ceding their power. Giving it up. 'We don't want that power,'” Maddow said as she told viewers that Republican leaders "slipped language into a procedural measure that would prevent any such resolution to end the tariffs from receiving any vote this year.”

She added: “They literally had the power to stop Trump from doing something that is hurting the country materially every single day. They have the power to stop him from what he's doing, and so what did they decide to do with that power? They decided to give that power away, so they no longer have that power, so they don't have to decide what to do with it.”

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And, Maddow said, “it gets better” as Republicans found a way to “save themselves from the terrible dilemma of whether or not to cast a recorded vote.”

“Republicans had to figure out some way out of this trap,” she said. “The national emergency law says Congress can end the emergency – he declared a national emergency in order to give himself the ability to proclaim these tariffs.”

“The national emergency law says if a resolution to end the emergency is introduced in Congress, Congress must consider that. They have to start the process of voting on it within 15 days. So now we know Democrats are introducing that resolution that starts the clock ticking. That means Congress is going to have to vote on this in 15 days – tick tock – in order to get around that binding requirement in the law.”

So, she pointed out, Republicans “proclaimed that between now and the end of this Congress, that is just one long day. That’s just one day. The whole rest of the Congress. I am not kidding.”

Watch the clip below or at this link:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman found himself particularly floored by a moment in President Donald Trump's address to Congress on Tuesday in which he made boasts about boosting auto manufacturing even as his tariffs on Canada and Mexico threaten to cripple auto supply chains.

Writing on his Substack page, Krugman explained how car production in the United States will be hampered by the tariffs on America's two biggest trading partners given the way that cars are assembled across all three countries.

"Automobile production, which is deeply integrated across our northern and southern borders — there really isn’t a U.S. auto industry, there’s a North American industry operating in all three countries — will be especially hard hit," he wrote. "I almost choked when Trump declared last night that 'we are going to have growth in the auto industry like nobody has ever seen.' Well, I guess we’ve never seen a large downturn in auto production outside a major recession, which is not to say that we won’t get a recession too."

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Taking stock of Trump's economic policies as a whole, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk's slash-and-burn approach to federal workers, Krugman argued that the United States right now is "trapped in a burning Tesla."

"If you don’t know this, the doors on Musk’s cars are designed to open electronically; if they have manual releases at all, they’re difficult to get at and use," he explained. "As a result, there have been multiple instances of people burning alive inside Teslas when the engines catch fire. Well, large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out."