[CTC] The GOP's Growing Rift on Trade

[Dolan, Mike]

"The is­sue is blur­ring all kinds of lines. Along with both uni­ons and the "Middle Amer­ic­an Rad­ic­al," Hil­lary Clin­ton and Don­ald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz all op­pose the pact."

The GOP's Growing Rift on Trade
National Journal
By Alex Rogers
December 15, 2015
http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/126106/gops-growing-rift-trade?mref=daily_mc

The Re­pub­lic­an Party has split anew on one of its core ten­ets-free trade-and the ques­tion is how long the war will last.
While the GOP has largely sup­por­ted free trade for over three dec­ades, its top-tier pres­id­en­tial can­did­ates are split on the re­cently-struck Pa­cific trade ac­cord, the most sig­ni­fic­ant in a gen­er­a­tion. And Don­ald Trump, the GOP front-run­ner, has been labeled by The Wall Street Journ­al as po­ten­tially the most pro­tec­tion­ist nom­in­ee since Her­bert Hoover.
The Trumped-up rhet­or­ic on clos­ing down the bor­ders-both to hu­mans and to trade-is so di­vis­ive that it en­dangers a split with­in the party, says Steph­en Moore, a con­ser­vat­ive eco­nom­ist who foun­ded the Com­mit­tee to Un­leash Prosper­ity with Steve For­bes, Larry Kud­low, and Ar­thur Laf­fer. He thinks Trump's can­did­acy pits a pess­im­ist­ic, "1950s-style" Re­pub­lic­an pop­u­list wing versus an op­tim­ist­ic, free-mar­ket wing of the party.
"Here's my big worry right now, as you fol­low what's happened in the last year or so and es­pe­cially in the last six weeks or so," said Moore in a phone in­ter­view. "I'm very nervous that Re­pub­lic­ans are be­com­ing a kind of 'close the bor­der' party-close the bor­der to people, close the bor­der to goods and ser­vices. And that's bad eco­nom­ics. It's ter­rible eco­nom­ics. And that's the wrong dir­ec­tion.
"I worry that the party is go­ing down this Pat Buchanan wing of the party-that's now the Don­ald Trump wing-is as­cend­ant," ad­ded Moore. "There's now be­com­ing a rift with­in the party between the 'build the wall' party and the-I think-the party Re­agan [built.]"
More than 30 years ago, Ron­ald Re­agan cam­paigned on a North Amer­ica Free Trade Agree­ment and, when he be­came pres­id­ent, entered the U.S. in­to the first free trade agree­ment with Is­rael. His em­phas­is on ex­pand­ing trade and lower­ing trade bar­ri­ers in an ef­fort to in­crease eco­nom­ic growth and cre­ate bet­ter pay­ing jobs stuck with the es­tab­lish­ment wing of the party. In 2012, the GOP plat­form stated: "A Re­pub­lic­an Pres­id­ent will com­plete ne­go­ti­ations for a Trans-Pa­cific Part­ner­ship to open rap­idly de­vel­op­ing Asi­an mar­kets to U.S. products. Bey­ond that, we en­vi­sion a world­wide mul­ti­lat­er­al agree­ment among na­tions com­mit­ted to the prin­ciples of open mar­kets, what has been called a 'Re­agan Eco­nom­ic Zone,' in which free trade will truly be fair trade for all con­cerned."
Yet of the nine top-tier can­did­ates tak­ing the GOP pres­id­en­tial de­bate stage Tues­day night, at least four op­pose the Trans-Pa­cific Part­ner­ship. Con­gres­sion­al ap­prov­al for TPP, which was re­cently reached by the U.S. and 11 oth­er coun­tries around the Pa­cific Rim, is un­der severe polit­ic­al pres­sure. Sen­ate Ma­jor­ity Lead­er Mitch Mc­Con­nell said Tues­day that he is "dis­ap­poin­ted" but un­de­cided on the agree­ment-and warned Pres­id­ent Obama that vot­ing on his po­ten­tially last leg­acy-de­fin­ing achieve­ment should wait un­til after the 2016 elec­tion.
"I think he ought to take in­to ac­count the ob­vi­ous polit­ics of trade at the mo­ment in our coun­try," Mc­Con­nell said at a Politico-sponsored break­fast.
The is­sue is blur­ring all kinds of lines. Along with both uni­ons and the "Middle Amer­ic­an Rad­ic­al," Hil­lary Clin­ton and Don­ald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz all op­pose the pact.
The vast ma­jor­ity of Demo­crats in Con­gress op­pose the agree­ment, as they think TPP would out­source Amer­ic­an jobs and de­press wages. Re­pub­lic­ans are split. Many are par­tic­u­larly skep­tic­al of this agree­ment be­cause it was ne­go­ti­ated un­der the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion, which has deemed TPP the most pro­gress­ive pact in U.S. his­tory, and are con­cerned it places bur­den­some en­vir­on­ment­al and labor reg­u­la­tions. Mc­Con­nell and the North Car­o­lina GOP con­gres­sion­al del­eg­a­tion have con­cerns about vari­ous to­bacco pro­vi­sions, and some Re­pub­lic­ans, par­tic­u­larly Sen. Or­rin Hatch of Utah, be­lieve the in­tel­lec­tu­al-prop­erty pro­tec­tions for phar­ma­ceut­ic­al com­pan­ies pro­du­cing bio­lo­gic drugs aren't strong enough.
But oth­er con­ser­vat­ives are keen on lower­ing tar­iffs and tak­ing ad­vant­age of great­er eco­nom­ic trade with the Pa­cific na­tions sur­round­ing China. Grover Nor­quist, the chief of Amer­ic­ans for Tax Re­form, sup­ports the pact, while ac­know­ledging flaws in in­tel­lec­tu­al-prop­erty pro­vi­sions, among oth­ers.
"This is both sound for­eign policy and it's great eco­nom­ic policy," Nor­quist toldNa­tion­al Journ­al. "It's 4,000 pages of tax cuts. Tar­iffs ... tar­iffs suck. Tar­iffs kill jobs. Tar­iffs slow the eco­nomy. This is good. It's not everything you wanted-no. But it's pro­gress to­wards al­most everything you wanted."
The GOP op­pos­i­tion, in his mind, "has everything to do with who wrote it and not what's in it."
Wheth­er this junc­ture sig­ni­fies a great­er surge in the pop­u­list wing of the GOP-or merely meas­ures a passing mo­ment, as oth­ers have be­fore-is up for de­bate.
"There's a Buchanan wing that's been anti-trade, anti-im­mig­rant for quite some time, and we're just see­ing an­oth­er round of that in Cruz and in Trump," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the dir­ect­or of do­mest­ic and eco­nom­ic policy for John Mc­Cain's 2008 pres­id­en­tial cam­paign. Holtz-Eakin, who served in George W. Bush's Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Ad­visers, can re­mem­ber the Re­pub­lic­an-led House's squeak­er vote in 2002 grant­ing the White House en­hanced trade-ne­go­ti­at­ing powers. "Not a new phe­nomen­on. Vis­ible on the cam­paign trail-I don't dis­agree with that. It's been around be­fore."

There are corporatists and populists in both political parties, in the Democratic and the Republican caucuses in Congress; and the popular opposition to the TPP, while heavily weighted to the progressive constituencies and their coalitions, nonetheless includes some important, if partial, critiques from socially conservative and libertarian perspectives. This minority opinion among Republicans could have outsize influence in the upcoming trade policy debates.

One fair trade sentiment where left meets right is preservation of Buy American protectionism; almost everybody loves keeping our tax dollars spent at home and opposes liberalization of the government procurement obligations. Another is the outrage against the human rights records of our TPP partners. Listen to Phyllis Schafly of the Eagle Forum ("leading the pro-family movement since 1972") as she warns members of her own political tribe that they shouldn't enable President Obama to pass the TPP:

Some of the eleven TPP countries are notorious for their persecution of Christians, including Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam. Brunei, for example [...] has a constitution that states: "The religion of Brunei Darussalam shall be the Muslim religion," which means Islamic Sharia law supersedes all other law and regulates all aspects of life [...]. Christians and their clergy are harassed at every turn in Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Spies attend nearly every Christian gathering.

Yet another shared concern across a trans-partisan spectrum is the assault on sovereignty that the ISDS sections of both TPP and TTIP represent. For progressives, sovereignty refers to self-determination and local democratic control, the immunity that sub-federal governments enjoy from direct corporate claims under secretive trade pacts. For conservatives, ISDS is an affront to the American judicial system, Article III of the Constitution and our rich jurisprudence, because it sets up secretive tribunals for foreign investors to make claims against U.S. taxpayers

Way on the Right, at the lunatic fringe, you run into anti-"free trade" groups like the Wisconsin-based John Birch Society, founded in 1958 to fight the Communist menace, standing for "less government, more responsibility and― with God's help―a better world." Nowadays, JBS has expanded its global government conspiracy theories to encompass the TPP/TTIP axis. The demographic of this wing of the anti free-trade grassroots crusade is different from the progressive Fair Trade movement, and so is their worldview. The paranoid bandwagons of the right rail against "big government" and therefore miss the real enemies to democracy ―namely, big multinational corporations. As the Director of Missions forewarns in Free Trade Deception Almost No One Understands:

"While you're being told that these free trade agreements will bring prosperity, they are actually being used by establishment elites to create economically and politically integrated blocs of nations that can be knit together into a New World Order. This means that the TPP and TTIP trade pacts are a direct threat to our national independence and personal freedoms [...]. Today, the TTIP agreement represents an attempt by European and American establishment elites to merge the United States with the EU; the TPP is an attempt to economically and politically integrate the United States with eleven Pacific Rim nations."

Straight parallel lines will never meet, and it remains to be seen whether the ideological spectrum forms a circle, not a line, around the issues of globalization. However, in the ongoing struggle against corporate rule, as Naomi Klein reminds us, "You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible, knowing that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right."

Today there are fair trade networks that are legitimately trans-partisan, in which differences of opinion on other issues are held in abeyance to permit concerted efforts to fix or nix, repair or replace, the TPP. An example is the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which includes on its governing board free trade critics from both labor and business, farmers, ranchers, and conservative economists. In the national conversations about working families in the global economy, trade policy reform cuts across party lines more than any other.


Michael F. Dolan, J.D.
Legislative Representative
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Desk  202.624.6891
Fax    202.624.8973
Cell    202.437.2254

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