Politics & Power Quote by Howard Coble

"It was fairly obvious" is doing a lot of political work here: it pre-bakes consensus and dares disagreement to sound naive or complicit. Howard Coble frames the claim as plain common sense rather than a contested interpretation of trade data, which is a classic Hill move when you want urgency without getting dragged into the weeds of methodology, pricing, or WTO nuance.

The noun choice is just as strategic. "Dumping" isn’t neutral; it’s a legal and moral accusation, a term that implies cheating rather than competition. Pair it with something as domestic and ordinary as "bedroom furniture" and you get a potent contrast: America’s private, intimate space supposedly invaded by a foreign economic strategy. It’s not steel or semiconductors, but that’s the point. Furniture is legible. You can picture the factory jobs, the small-town manufacturers, the tangible objects arriving in containers. The policy debate becomes kitchen-table cinema.

The subtext is a familiar triangulation: China as a deliberate actor ("to gain market access and share"), American workers as victims, and U.S. policymakers as the necessary enforcers. By asserting intent on China’s part, Coble isn’t merely arguing about prices; he’s arguing about power and sovereignty. The line compresses a complicated era of U.S.-China trade tensions into a clean morality play, one that invites tariffs and anti-dumping duties to feel less like protectionism and more like self-defense.