[CTC] Climate rider helps sink Obama trade agenda

[Arthur Stamoulis]

POLITICO

Climate rider helps sink Obama trade agenda

By Elana Schor 

6/12/15 6:05 PM EDT
Climate change played a surprising and pivotal role in bringing down President Barack Obama’s trade agenda in the House on Friday as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi invoked the environment in announcing her opposition.

Pelosi rejected Obama’s concerted effort to woo Democrats, citing her opposition to the language that was added by Republicans at the last minute to a related bill that would bar his administration from considering climate in trade deals. Environmentalists cheered as Pelosi used a high-profile floor speech shortly before the dramatic trade vote to tout her decades-long push for national action on global warming.

“The connection between the environment and commerce is inseparable,” Pelosi said. While she made sure to “salute the president” for striking a bilateral emissions deal with China, Pelosi lamented the climate provision in the trade bill as a sign that Congress is “slowing down our response when we should be proactive.”

Green groups had worked for weeks to push House Democrats to reject the trade package, which included a bill giving Obama fast-track authority to push through the 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership pact, a Trade Adjustment Assistance bill for displaced workers, and the customs bill that contained the climate language sought by conservatives.

While that climate rider was far from the only factor influencing the Democratic leader, Democrats pointed to Pelosi’s opposition as crucial to defeating the TAA bill whose future is now very much in limbo.

May Boeve, executive director of 350.org <http://350.org/>, credited Pelosi in a statement for resisting “enormous pressure” and voting no. Yet she acknowledged, as did Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, that Friday’s victory could prove short-lived if Democrats relent next week and support TAA when the issue is expected to return for a second vote — a very real possibility, given that fast-track authority passed with mostly GOP votes.

“Today was a big win,” Boeve said, “but the thousands of climate activists across the country who stood up and linked arms with fellow progressives to get us here won’t rest until fast-track and TPP are dead for good.”

The Ways and Means Committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Sander Levin, said only “we’ll see” when asked if Obama’s party would maintain its resistance to the TAA bill next week. He has repeatedly decried the climate provision in particular, however, and added in a brief interview that he hoped senators would push to remove it during conference talks on the related customs bill because “it shouldn’t be there in the first place.”

Rep. Raul Grijalva, senior Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, hailed Pelosi’s climate comments and said her no vote “raised the profile” of the issue’s role in trade talks in a way that would help stakeholder groups “weigh in to hold our votes on our side of the aisle” when the House votes again on TAA.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), who took fire from long-standing environmentalist allies for supporting fast-track, cited the climate language in announcing he would vote no on the customs bill, and he praised Pelosi for her climate-centric opposition.

“Any time people feature climate change,” he said in an interview, “I think it’s a positive.”

Even one of the trade deal’s biggest Democratic proponents, Rep. Gerry Connolly, said Republicans had made a mistake by adding the climate language, He said he hopes the Obama administration will steer trade talks in a direction that aligns with its environmental agenda, and he noted that the negotiating objectives that the climate provision would change are non-binding.

Of course, that outcome depends on Obama’s ability to steer his entire trade package through the Capitol next week — which remains in doubt after Friday’s votes.

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.citizenstrade.org/pipermail/ctcfield-citizenstrade.org/attachments/20150612/bc3ac2f3/attachment-0001.htm>