Not bending
The Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on whether it will take up a bill to give the president trade promotion authority, otherwise known as fast-track trade legislation. If passed, the TPA would soon be applied to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12-nation trade treaty that is now nearly completely negotiated. But it could also be used for any other trade deals as long as it is in force, just as previous fast-track authority has done.
Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has vowed to stop consideration of the bill until the Senate takes up transportation legislation and reforms of government surveillance. If Reid is successful, it would delay consideration of fast-tracking until June, giving the opposition more time to organize against it. The legislation is widely expected to clear the Senate anyway. But the House vote is very much in doubt given widespread opposition from Democrats there. A strong fight in the Senate, even though it loses, could strengthen opposition in the House.
Meanwhile, President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) are continuing their public argument over fast-tracking. Obama sat down with Matt Bai of Yahoo News and took on an issue Warren has now raised: A future president could, she says, use the fast-tracking authority to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform:
“Think about the logic of that, right?” [Obama] went on. “The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don’t repeat what happened in 2007, 2008. And then I sign a provision that would unravel it?
“I’d have to be pretty stupid,” Obama said, laughing. “This is pure speculation. She and I both taught law school, and you know, one of the things you do as a law professor is you spin out hypotheticals. And this is all hypothetical, speculative.”
He added a personal jab. She's just a "politician like everybody else” trying to get her voice heard, and on the trade deal "her arguments don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny.”
Join us in signing and sending a petition to Congress: Don’t fast-track fast-track for TPP.
Read what Warren has to say on the matter below the fold.
This morning, Warren got a chance to expand on her views in an interview with Greg Sargent. One element of the TPP that Warren and other foes have raised is the inclusion of an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision that establishes an arbitration vehicle for a corporation that decides a nation's regulations treats it unfairly. ISDS is not new and is included in many other trade pacts. While it allows corporations arbitration rights, the same is not allowed for unions or environmental groups who have problems with a nation's regulations:
PLUM LINE: But don’t you get 60 days to review it after the deal is finalized, with the authority to revoke fast track?
WARREN: The president has committed only to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track. At that point it will be impossible for us to amend the agreement or to block any part of it without tanking the whole TPP. The TPP is basically done. If the president is so confident it’s a good deal, he should declassify the text and let people see it before asking Congress to tie its hands on fixing it. [...]
PLUM LINE: Is there a scenario under which ISDS could be written the way he says it is being written?
WARREN: I’ve sat with many legal scholars to talk about this issue, and I have not seen a draft that would do what the president says he has already accomplished….Hillary Clinton in her book raised concerns about precisely this issue. Just last week, some of the top legal and economic minds in this country, including the president’s mentor from Harvard, Laurence Tribe, and Nobel-prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, raised exactly this concern.
Warren went on to say that fast-track legislation, which would be in force for six years, could be used together with the ISDS provision in the TPP to undermine Dodd-Frank by a future president who doesn't have a commitment to the financial reforms. Going after Dodd-Frank the direct route would take 60 votes in the Senate. But the fast-track legislation cuts that to 51 votes.
To make her point of view perfectly clear, Sargent cites a recent Warren speech:
“In the next few weeks, Congress will decide whether to give the President Fast Track authority. That authority would prevent Congress from amending trade deals and reduce its ability to block trade deals—not just for the upcoming transpacific trade deal, but for ANY trade deal cut by ANY president over the next six years…
“This is a long-term problem—a six-year problem, if Fast Track passes. A Republican President could easily use a future trade deal to override our domestic financial rules. And this is hardly a hypothetical possibility: We are already deep into negotiations with the European Union on a trade agreement and big banks on both sides of the Atlantic are gearing up to use that agreement to water down financial regulations. A six-year Fast Track bill is the missing link they need to make that happen.”
As Warren quite rightly says, if TPP is such a good deal, then the administration should show the whole nation what's been negotiated
before granting fast-track legislation instead of
after. If it
is a worker-friendly, environmentally protective trade deal—the best ever, as the administration has claimed—showing its contents to all of us ought to be all that is needed to change the minds of its foes to support it.