Over the years, the Democratic opposition in the House to so-called "free trade" has grown, with more members opposed to so-called "free trade" than say back in the 1990s; the Senate has continued to be a disaster when it comes to building opposition to trade deals--basically, if you can't stop it in the House, it's a done deal. So, this is why today's new conference on opposition to so-called "fast track" is good news--especially as the State of the Union looms when, I'm guessing, the president will offer up the Trans Pacific Partnership as an area of "bi-partisanship" agreement.
The full video of the press conference is here.
Excerpts, via The NYTimes:
As Mr. Obama works to secure the so-called trade promotion authority, a coalition of Democratic lawmakers and activists from organized labor, environmental, religious and civil rights groups is stepping up efforts to stop him.
“This is one of the broadest advocacy coalitions that we’ve had,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who is leading the opposition. “There is no reason why we should exacerbate the loss of jobs or lower wages in the United States.”
And:
Even as the president was boasting of the American automobile industry’s resurgence, Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, accused him of pursuing trade deals that could devastate the industry and cost American jobs.
She and other opponents find a cautionary tale in the adoption of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and the creation of the World Trade Organization, products of a collaboration between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
Those measures “woke up Congress about what ‘fast track’ means,” she said in an interview, and ever since, "It’s really hard to get them to delegate that authority.” She noted that in the 21 years since those deals were approved, Congress has awarded trade promotion authority to a president only for a total of five years.
“For Obama, it’s particularly tricky, because that big power grab would be used for this agreement that is basically a Trojan horse for every kind of extreme corporate proposal that could not get passed in the sunshine of public debate,” she said, referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.[emphasis added]
Let me just repeat the words above: workers got screwed in the 1990s because of
the adoption of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and the creation of the World Trade Organization, products of a collaboration between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
By the way, for the sake of those interested in a really good explanation of the evils of "fast track", Wallach gave a great piece of testimony back in 2007, which I posted here. Wallach has been a leading warrior on defeating this shit since NAFTA. Excerpts:
This is because Fast Track ensures that Congress’ role is performed too late to do any good: Congress only gets a “yes” or “no” vote on a trade agreement after it’s been signed and “entered into.” That vote also ok’s hundreds of changes to wide swaths of U.S. non-trade law to conform our policies to what the “trade” deals require. By eliminating Congres s’ right to approve an agreement’s contents before it is signed, Fast Track also allows outrageous provisions to be “super glued” onto actual trade provisions. Did the U.S. Congress really intend to extend U.S. drug patent terms from the pre-WTO 17-year terms to the WTO-required 20-year terms? This requirement was tucked into the WTO’s Trade
Related Intellectual Property provisions. The University of Minnesota School of Pharmacy found that the WTO’s windfall patent extensions cost U.S. cons umers at least $6 billion in higher drug prices and increased Medicare and Medicaid costs nearly $1.5 billion just for drugs then under patent.
Because under Fast Track, Congress never had the ability to review, much less vote on the WTO text before it was signed, this and numerous other outrageous non-trade policy changes were bundled in with legitimate trade provisions.
Federalism is also flattened by Fast Track. In a form of international pre-emption, state officials also must conform our local laws to hundreds of pages of non-trade domestic policy
restrictions in these “trade” pacts, yet state officials do not even get Congress’ cursory role Fast Track is how we got stuck with NAFTA, WTO and other race-to-the-bottom deals. Fast Track trashes the “checks and balances” that are essential to our democracy – handcuffing
Congress, state officials and the public so we can not hold U.S. negotiators accountable during trade negotiations while corporate lobbyists call the shots.
In one lump sum, Fast Track:
• Delegates away Congress’ ability to veto the choice of countries with which to launch negotiations;
• Delegates away Congress’ constitutional authority to set the substantive rules for international commerce. Congress lists “negotiating objectives,” but these are not mandatory or enforceable and Executive Branch negotiators regularly ignore them. In fact, the 1988 Fast Track used for NAFTA and WTO explicitly required that labor rights be included in U.S. trade agreements.
• Fast Track permits the Executive Branch to sign trade agreements before Congress votes on them, locking down the text and creating a false sense of crisis regarding congressional wishes to change provisions of a signed agreement.
• Fast Track empowers the Executive Branch to write legislation (Congress’ constitutional role), circumvent normal congressional committee review, suspend Senate cloture and other procedures, and have guaranteed “privileged” House and Senate floor votes 90 days after the President usurps one more congressional role by submitting legislation (Congress’ role).
• Fast Track rules forbids all amendments and permits only 20 hours of debate on the signed deal and conforming changes to U.S. law.
It's this secretive process that led Bernie Sanders Monday to demand to see a copy of the full draft of the TPP, as I wrote about
here.
Obviously, this is a tough fight. However, keep in mind that there is a core of Republicans who are also opposed to certain aspects of so-called "free trade"--there has been, since NAFTA, a left-right meeting-of-the-minds on the issue. I don't know enough yet about the newly elected Republicans on this topic--yes, on the rest of the issues they are mostly nuts--to know what the numbers are to defeat "fast track".
But, at least, we have some Democrats in the House willing to put up a fight to kill a most undemocratic process.