New York Times runs first GOP legislator since Tom Cotton broke the editorial page

On Friday, an opinion piece from Senator Josh Hawley was run in the New York Times, slamming the Biden administration's current supply chain crisis and announcing a bill to get more critical goods made in America rather than overseas.

"America is mired in a supply chain crisis. Imports are slow to arrive, items on store shelves are becoming more scarce and prices are rising," Hawley began.

"President Biden's reckless spending policy is the immediate cause of these higher prices, but the problems have been brewing for decades. Now we must change course. We can rebuild what made this nation great in the first place by making things in America again," he continued in the guest essay.

Hawley wrote that at the core of the supply crisis is a "crisis of production," felt hardest in goods that are necessary and essential like personal protection equipment, pharmaceutical drugs, and semiconductors.

"…the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a hard truth: The United States — the strongest country in the world — cannot produce an adequate supply of the critical goods it needs," the GOP senator stated.

"The failure of the nation's productive capacity to keep up with its needs was not inevitable," Hawley noted. "It was a choice."

He wrote that politicians and experts in Washington DC from both sides of the aisle have aided in this crisis in recent decades, prioritizing "the free flow of capital over the wages of American workers," and "the free flow of goods over the resiliency of our nation's supply chains."

"We liberalized and expanded trade relations with China under the delusion that it could be influenced into becoming a peace-loving democracy. We ceded more and more of our national sovereignty to multinational organizations like the World Trade Organization, and supported China's membership to that body," he wrote.

The results of these "bad policies" have been "disastrous," noted Hawley, with trade that has boosted multinational corporations that exploit cheap labor abroad and "and offshoring America's industrial commons and the capabilities of its manufacturing sector."

Thousands of factories have been closed in pursuit of cheaper labor overseas "and the economic security of the United States is now more vulnerable to unpredictable crises like global pandemics," said Hawley, who added that the country is now "dangerously dependent" on the production capabilities of China, "our chief adversary."

"These policies were sold to us as a path to greater wealth, but they've made us weaker and more vulnerable," he wrote.

With the chaos affecting the supply chain and trade deficits reaching a record high, Hawley noted that "alarm bells could sound," but "President Biden seems determined to repeat the follies of the past."

"His administration acts as if we must embrace lower expectations and that America must come to accept that unstable supply and volatile prices are unavoidable. As if we are too weak to do otherwise," wrote Hawley.

"That's wrong. America is a strong nation. We should start acting like one," he continued, noting that the country needs to "fundamentally restructure" its trade policy.

With that, Hawley announced that he his proposing new legislation, the Make in America to Sell in America Act. "Under this plan, officials at the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense will identify goods and inputs they determine to be critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base," explained Hawley.

"These goods would then become subject to a new local content requirement: if companies want access to the American market for these critical and essential goods, then over 50 percent of the value of those goods they sell in America must be made in America," he added.

Under these new requirements, companies would have three years to comply, with the possibility to receive waivers if more time is necessary.

The legislation would also provide a way for domestic products to petition the US International Trade Commission "if they suspect that corporations or importers have violated the local content requirement, and the secretary of commerce can take enforcement actions such as civil penalties following an investigation to ensure the new standards are met."

"The United States must not settle for scarcity," wrote Hawley. "We must never lower our expectations. Just the opposite. The strength and resourcefulness of the American people are unlimited. Let them build. Let them create. And they'll change the world."

Hawley's op-ed piece comes more than a year after Senator Tom Cotton's, the last time a Republican senator wrote a piece for the outlet.

That piece received backlash for calling for "an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers."

The editorial staff issued a statement on the piece following complaints, stating that it "fell short of our standards and should not have been published."