Senator Uses First Bill To Ban Cars Already Unavailable For Sale In The U.S.

Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin introduced a bill to the Senate floor on April 10 aimed at preventing Chinese vehicles from entering the United States. Of course, there are currently zero vehicles being sold by Chinese automakers in the U.S. and with the pointless trade war between our two countries, there won't be any for a long time. This ill-advised and pointless bill is the first time the Democrat has introduced new legislation since winning her seat in the November election.

The bill, called the Connected Vehicle National Secretary Review Act, is meant to "...provide more explicit statutory authority, strengthening protections against national security risks and ensuring more durable protection against Chinese connected vehicles," according to CBS News. The legislation will give the Department of Commerce the ability to ban connected vehicles or components from entering the U.S. if they deem them to pose a national security threat. Of course, this is all happening with President Trump's newly-founded trade war with China (and the rest of the world) escalating.

Here's a little more on how the bill would work, from CBS News:

If passed, the Department of Commerce can review and potentially block the sale, importation or transaction that involves a "connected vehicle or component designed, built, or supplied by anyone controlled by or subject to the jurisdiction of a country of concern, including China." That would include components and connected vehicles manufactured by Chinese companies that operate in third-party countries like Mexico.

Slotkin, who is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and Pentagon official, introduced a similar bill when she was a U.S. House representative in 2024, according to the Detroit News. She has long been active on issues involving Chinese vehicles, saying they "could collect huge amounts of data on America and Americas, which poses a significant national security threat." She says peoples' data, our infrastructure and Michigan's auto industry as a whole are "at stake." Senator, I promise you that if China wanted data on any of these things, they wouldn't need a car to gather it. 

You might be thinking, "But wait, don't some automakers, like Ford, build cars in China?" Yes, they do, but they're not going to be the focus of the bill, according to the outlet. Instead, they'll focus solely on goods from Chinese companies with ties to the country's government.

In a lot of ways, it feels like the freshman Democrat is giving Trump a win here. Slotkin's bill would actually codify parts of ill-advised executive actions from both the Biden and Trump administrations that directed the Commerce Department to investigate national security threats from Chinese products, the Detroit News reports.

Of course, this is all completely pointless. Chinese automakers like BYD and SAIC don't sell any vehicles in the U.S., and because of these new tariffs, it's even more unlikely that they ever will. It's a damn shame, too, because it's depriving U.S. customers of really good products.