There is a law called the National Emergencies Act. It has a safety valve in it. When a president declares a national emergency, any member of Congress can force a vote to end that emergency — and the clock is written into the statute, so leadership can't just sit on it.
On February 1, 2025, Trump used emergency powers to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. That started the clock.
The House turned the clock off. Not by voting on the tariffs and losing. By declaring that days had stopped being days.
The vehicle was H. Res. 211, the rule for a government funding bill. Buried at item 19 of that rule is this:
"Provides that each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025."
The House Rules Committee reported that rule by a record vote of 9-3 on March 10, 2025. The committee's own record lists the floor manager for it on one line:
MANAGERS: Fischbach/McGovern
That is Michelle Fischbach, who represents Minnesota's 7th District — more than 30,000 farms, and roughly $9 billion in agricultural products a year, nearly half the state's total.
What a "manager" does
The Rules Committee is the small panel that decides what the full House gets to vote on, what amendments are allowed, and what unrelated provisions ride along inside a procedural resolution nobody reads. Most members of Congress never get near it.
The manager is the member who carries the rule to the floor, defends it in debate, and answers for what's in it. On March 11, 2025, that rule passed the House 216-214. Fischbach voted aye.
Two votes. If two Republicans had gone the other way, the tariff clock would still have been running.
Fischbach's counterpart across the aisle was Jim McGovern, the Rules ranking member, who said Republicans were "sneaking" the provision into the rule because they wanted "no floor vote, no Republicans on record and no way to stop these devastating price hikes." Rep. Gregory Meeks put it more plainly: "House Republicans are declaring that the days are no longer days and that time has literally stopped."
Then they did it again, and again. H. Res. 313 froze the clock from April 9 through September 30, 2025. H. Res. 707 froze it from September 16, 2025 forward, and H. Res. 722 stretched that to January 31, 2026. As the National Taxpayers Union pointed out, none of these were "presented for individual consideration but instead rolled into rules for other 'must-pass' bills."
Almost a year later, the vote finally happened
The clock ran out on the blockade eventually. On February 11, 2026, the House at last voted on a resolution to end the national emergency Trump declared on February 1, 2025 — the one that put tariffs on Canada, Minnesota's largest export market, which buys roughly $7 billion in Minnesota goods a year.
It passed, 219 to 211. Six Republicans crossed over to vote yes, led by Colorado's Jeff Hurd.
Fischbach voted no.
So the record reads like this. When the House could have voted, she managed the rule that stopped it. When the House finally did vote, she was against it.
Her district paid for the delay
That year of no votes was not a quiet year in western Minnesota.
Total 2025 soybean sales to China came to zero — the first time in nearly a decade the U.S. went a month without selling China a single soybean. The federal government moved toward another farm bailout, public money to patch a hole federal policy made. Farmers who wanted their congresswoman to fight the tariffs got something else: in June 2025 Fischbach joined 55 colleagues in a letter commending the Trump administration on trade and expressing "strong support" for its negotiations.
This month, at Minnesota Farmfest, she defended the tariffs from the stage and got booed from the front row. She also sits on the Ways and Means trade subcommittee — the specific committee, in the specific chamber, that the Constitution gives power over tariffs.
She has the trade seat. She has the Rules seat. She used the second one to make sure the first one never had to matter.
This is bigger than tariffs
Set the trade policy aside for a second. What happened here is that the House of Representatives, to avoid taking a recorded position, wrote into its own procedural rules that time was not passing.
The National Emergencies Act clock exists precisely because Congress knew a future Congress might be too cowardly to vote. So it made the vote automatic. H. Res. 211 was the workaround: keep the emergency powers, skip the accountability.
It's the same committee, and the same instinct, that blocked the Epstein files twice in 2025 — first killing Ro Khanna's amendment 5-7 in July, then killing the standalone Epstein Files Transparency Act 8-4 in September. Fischbach voted no both times. A discharge petition eventually went over the committee's head and forced a floor vote, where the bill passed 427 to 1.
Control the floor so the vote never happens, because the vote would be embarrassing. That's the play.
The difference with the tariff rule is that the price shows up in a grain elevator.
Source
House Committee on Rules, H.R. 1968 — Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (rule text, committee vote, and managers), and Roll Call, "House majority rules: When a 'calendar day' isn't what it seems," March 18, 2025. Photo: Michelle Fischbach at a Western Caucus field hearing, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
