Republicans in Congress refused to vote President Obama’s Supreme Court nominations on the grounds that he is a lame duck. But it’s highly likely they’ll join with him to enact the odious Trans Pacific Partnership agreement right after the November elections, when he and they really will be lame ducks.
When Congress voted to allow a “fast track” decision—an up or down vote with little time to discuss the agreement—it was Republican votes that provided the margin of victory.
“Fast track” means there’s no way to stop a lame-duck vote on TPP, even if anti-TPP candidates sweep Congress in the November elections.
All it would take is that President Obama, House Speaker Mitch McConnell and other TPP supporters are brazen enough.
Bernie Sanders opposed the TPP. Donald Trump opposes it. Hillary Clinton promoted it when she was Secretary of State, but she says she now has reservations about it. Her supporters on the Democratic platform committee voted down a plank that would criticize the TPP so as not to embarrass President Obama.
The TPP—and the related Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement and Trade in Services Agreement—are corporate wish lists written into international law.
These limit the power of governments to legislate and regulate to protect workers, consumers and the environment, grant drug and media companies new intellectual property rights, and create panels of arbitrators that can impose penalties on governments for depriving international corporations of “expected profits.”
So it’s fitting, in a way, that these anti-democratic trade agreements are likely to be enacted into law by a President and members of Congress who may not have run for re-election or been voted out of office.
The Obama administration has moved very shrewdly to deflect some of the main criticisms of the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership agreement.
Fast Track is not as fast as I previously thought. It is true that once the TPP is submitted to Congress, there will be only 90 days to debate and decide. But there will be a longer preliminary phase in which to study and discuss the proposed agreement. I don’t know whether this was true all along and I (along with many others) didn’t realize it, or whether this is something new. But in any case, the TPP is not necessarily going to be rushed through Congress as quickly as I had previously thought.
Evidently there will be amendments to address some of the main criticisms. For example, tobacco companies will not be able to use the Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism to protest restrictions on cigarette advertising.
But here is the Cato Institute’s timetable for making the agreement public.
Even with the deal “concluded,” the president cannot sign the agreement until 90 days after he officially announces his intention to do so. During that period, there will be intensive consultations between the administration and Congress over the details; the legal text of the agreement will be made available to the public on the internet; the USTR advisory committees will submit their assessments of the deal to Congress; and there will be ample opportunity for informed, robust domestic debate about the deal’s pros and cons.
After the 90-day consultation period, the president can return to the TPP partners with input from Congress, which may or may not warrant modifications to the deal to improve its chances of ratification.
Once the deal is signed, the administration then has a maximum of 60 days to prepare a list of all U.S. laws that will need to be changed on account of TPP; the U.S. International Trade Commission will have a maximum of 105 days to do an analysis of the likely impact of the TPP on the U.S. economy; the congressional trade committees will perform mock markups of the implementing legislation; and, then, the final TPP implementing legislation will be introduced in both chambers.
After the legislation is introduced, the House will have 60 days and the Senate will have 30 days to hold votes. These requirements stem from the Trade Promotion Authority legislation enacted over the summer. If the TPP is going to be ratified by this Congress under this president, the timelines suggest that there isn’t much room for delay.
Without Fast Track, there would be no deadline at all for voting the TPP up or down, there would be no restriction on amendments, and 60 votes instead of a 51-vote majority would be required for the TPP to clear the Senate.
POLITICO reported that four more trade agreements are now being negotiated.
Following Congress’ hard-fought approval of “fast-track” trade authority last week, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman vowed not only to complete the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership but an even bigger pact with the European Union and three other major trade deals — all in the 18 months remaining in President Barack Obama’s term.
It could add up to the biggest trade blitz in history, transforming the rules under which the world does business.
“We’ve got a lot of pots on the stove,” Froman told POLITICO while watching senators cast their final votes to send the legislation to the president. “We want to get TPP done and through Congress. We want to get TTIP negotiated. We’re going to finish ITA. I’m hoping to finish EGA and TISA.”
Those would be, in order: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement with the European Union, an even bigger pact than the TPP in terms of economic size; the World Trade Organization’s Information Technology Agreement, which covers about 97 percent of world IT trade; the Environmental Goods Agreement, accounting for 86 percent international commerce in green goods; and the 24-party Trade in International Services Agreement, which involves three-quarters of the United States’ gross domestic product and two-thirds of the world’s services, such as banking and communications.
Scope of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
Scope of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
Scope of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement
If Congress approves the Trade Promotion Authority, aka Fast Track, it will grease the way not only for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but for two other toxic trade agreements now in the pipeline—the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is basically the same as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, except that it covers a different set of countries.
The Trade in Services Agreement is mainly about deregulation of financial services, but it also has a section on “movement of natural persons.” In other words, TISA would cover immigrationtemporary visas for specialized workers, according to a draft released by Wikileaks.
Notice which countries are not in any of the three proposed agreements. The BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—would retain sovereignty over their economies after United States, the European Union and their satellites give them up.
I’m strongly against the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership agreement and the fast track proposal for approving it, based on what I know of both.
I write this even though I admit I don’t know what will be in the TPP when it is finally submitted to Congress. I could be wrong in everything I say. I don’t think I will be, in fact I’m pretty sure I won’t be, but in this post, I link to arguments in favor as well as those opposed so you can judge both sides of the question.
I’ve been writing about the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership agreement as if it were a done deal, and the only significance of the Trade Promotion Authority bill, aka “fast track,” in regard to the TPP is to push it through with a minimum of debate. This is not so.
I do in fact think that is the significance of “fast track,” but I should emphasize that the TPP is not a done deal. The Japanese government is balking at some of the proposals and, without Japan, the TPP would be meaningless.
So a “fast track” plan that allowed Congress to give meaningful input into the negotiations would be important. Whether or not the Wyden-Hatch-Ryan bill does this is an important question.
The Trade Promotion Authority bill, otherwise known as “fast track,” would govern how such agreements are negotiated and voted on in the future.
In theory this could work well. Negotiators would pursue objectives set by Congress, the leaders of Congress would be kept informed as negotiations progress and ratification of the agreement would be only a formality. But there is no mechanism in the current fast track bill by which Congress can call the negotiators to account or demand information.
Fast track assumes good faith on the part of all concerned, and, based on the historic record, including the way the TPP has been negotiated, I think this would be a naive assumption.
Update: The headline should read “At last fast track comes before Congress”. TPP hasn’t yet come before Congress and it is possible (though unlikely) that it never will.
I’ve been ranting so long about the danger and harm in the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement that I’m at a loss for something new to say now that it is actuallynearly ready to come before Congress for a vote.
The TPP is an agreement among 12 nations, including the USA, Canada, Australia and Japan, which would set limits on financial regulation and food safety standards and make drug patent and copyright laws more restrictive.
Its most controversial provisions is the Investor State Dispute Settlement system, which would allow foreign investors to seek sanctions against governments whose labor, environmental, health and other laws deprived it of its just profits.
Under ISDS, “foreign investors” – mostly transnational corporations – have the ability to bypass U.S. courts and challenge U.S. government action and inaction before international tribunals authorized to order U.S. taxpayer compensation to the firms.
Today Congressional leaders announced support for fast track authority, which means that the House of Representatives would have no more than 60 days to debate the agreement and the Senate 30 additional days, after which they would vote “yes” or “no”.
This does not mean that fast track has been approved. This would require a vote by the full House and Senate, which is yet to come.
The TPP is a thick and complex document. Negotiations have been conducted under strict secrecy, and the material will be new to most members of Congress. What little is publicly known comes from leaked negotiating documents, many of them through WikiLeaks. (Thank you, Julian Assange).
If TPP is approved through a fast track process, I would bet that dozens of congresspeople a year later will be saying they wouldn’t have voted for it if they had realized all that was in it.
Top congressional leaders, including Senators Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, the chair and vice-chair of the Senate finance committee, and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, chair of the House ways and means committee, announced their support for “fast track” approval of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.
This would mean that the House would have 60 days to discuss this complicated agreement, and the Senate an additional 30 days, after which they would have to vote the agreement up or down, without amendment.
But the fact that the leaders support fast track doesn’t mean it’s a done deal. The procedure still must go before the House and Senate as a whole.
I think the TPP is a bad idea, but, even it were a good idea, it deserves more discussion than fast track would allow.
Well, it’s too late now to try to influence the negotiations.
Senators Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, the chair and vice-chair of the Senate finance committee, and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, the chair of the House ways and means committee, agreed to support fast-track approval for the proposed 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.
This would mean that the House would have 60 days to discuss the agreement, and the Senate would have an additional 30 days, before they voted “yes” or “no”, with no possibility of amendment.
The fact that President Obama and powerful Congressional leaders support fast track does not mean that it has been approved. The procedure requires a vote of the House and Senate, and, since there is strong opposition in both parties, it may well not be approved.
The problem with “fast track” is that it would require the Senate and House to debate these two complex agreements under tight deadlines and then vote them up or down without amendments. Since the provisions of the two agreements won’t be known until they are introduced, there wouldn’t have been time to intelligently evaluate the agreements.
Leaked information indicates that both agreements would enact corporate wish lists into international law that couldn’t be changed by individual governments. The worst are the “investor protection” provisions that allow corporations to ask unelected international tribunals to overturn national laws and regulations or order compensation for unjust loss of “expected profits.”
Blocking the TPP and the TTIP are a good first step. The next will be to roll back or amend the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Treaty and all other so-called trade agreements with “investor protection” provisions.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) is a proposed treaty being negotiated by representatives of the United States and 11 Pacific Rim nations, which would create international tribunals with authority to override laws and court decisions that interfered with corporate rights.
The treaty is being negotiated in secret, but some alarming provisions have leaked out. Corporations would have allowed to ask for damages from unfair health and environmental regulations that cost them “expected profits.” Food safety laws could be overridden if they exceeded “international standards.” The U.S. Department of Energy would lose the right to regulate exports of natural gas.
Even if I’m wrong and some of these ideas are good, Congress ought to have the final say on these issues, and ought to be able to change policy to meet changing circumstances.
In order to get the treaty through, President Obama will need “fast track” authority, which limits debate, creates an accelerated time frame and requires an up-and-down vote on the treaty with no amendments.
Asking for an up-and-down vote is reasonable; foreign nations shouldn’t be expected to negotiate twice. But the limited debate and accelerated time frame only make sense if the Senate is fully informed about the treaty in advance. In this case, the draft treaty and the U.S. negotiating position have been withheld from Congress—although not from some 600 corporate representatives who are providing expert advice.
At present the government does not have “fast track” authority. It lapsed in 2007. It should not be renewed just to get TPP through. Even if I’m wrong, and TPP is a good idea, Congress ought to be able to fully understand it before enacting it. Americans should write their Senators and ask them to vote against “fast track” authority.
When Congress voted to allow a “fast track” decision—an up or down vote with little time to discuss the agreement—it was Republican votes that provided the margin of victory.
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