This law is killing US jobs AND harming national security

A hundred years ago somebody in Congress decided American shipping needed protecting, and today we build a handful of cargo vessels a year while China cranks out more than 4,000. That's not a rounding error. That's the entire industry, gone, buried under a law that was supposed to keep it alive.

The Jones Act was sold as a national security measure, and there's something almost funny about that now, since the thing it was meant to secure has collapsed on its watch. You cannot claim a policy protects American shipbuilding when American shipbuilding barely exists. We used to be able to surge merchant marine capacity in a crisis. Now we'd be lucky to scrape together a few hulls, while Beijing has the yards, the workforce, and the order books to match a wartime economy. That's the actual security risk here, not foreign ships docking in Honolulu.

This is a case where the free-market instinct and the national security instinct point the same direction, which almost never happens in Washington. Protectionism was supposed to build strength. Instead it built a museum piece, a law nobody dares touch because shipping unions and a few coastal interests like the shelter, even as the shelter rots around them. Trump has never been shy about tearing up bad trade deals. This is one worth tearing up for real, not as a talking point.

Congress doesn't need another study or a task force. It needs to admit the experiment failed and let American shipbuilders compete for real business again, instead of protecting a corpse with a hundred-year-old law nobody's willing to bury.