[CTC] Despite Setback, Supporters See Multiple Ways Forward For Fast Track

[Arthur Stamoulis]

INSIDE US TRADE
Friday, June 12, 2015

Despite Setback, Supporters See Multiple Ways Forward For Fast Track

Despite a setback on Friday (June 12), House Republicans and Democrats supportive of a bill to renew Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) are aiming to resurrect it next week by staging a successful vote to reauthorize Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), but also believe they can pass a standalone TPA bill if that fails.

These lawmakers are pinning their hopes for a successful TAA vote next week on increased lobbying by President Obama and pro-TPA House Democrats, even though it failed by a margin of 126-302 on Friday.

Leaders of the overall pro-trade New Democrat Coalition signaled they hoped to persuade more Democrats to vote for TAA by convincing them the TAA program will die once and for all if they do not renew it now. That argument, which the White House made in force on Friday and the day prior, proved unconvincing for many Democrats.

House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX), Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) on Friday all put the onus on House Democrats and the White House to come up with the votes necessary to pass TAA, and some have indicated Republican leadership has hit the ceiling of Republican votes in favor of the program. Some said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who voted against TAA herself Friday, must take up the work of shoring up support for the upcoming second vote.

"The onus is on Pelosi and the president to put the votes together and bring it back up," Boustany said. "And I think we are prepared to bring it back up, but they're going to have to show that they're ready to go with it." He said that if the second TAA vote fails again, then "the Democrats have killed" TAA.

House Democrats supportive of TPA, however, are signaling that Republicans must also be involved in the effort to bring a successful TAA vote to fruition. "I think this is going to require bipartisan cooperation," New Democrat Coalition Chairman Ron Kind (D-WI) told reporters. "I think they know this is a shared responsibility.”

A pro-trade Democratic aide said the second vote on TAA will likely come on Tuesday, given that lawmakers typically return to Washington and open up the legislative session late on Monday afternoon. But he conceded that it would be an uphill climb to get sufficient Democratic votes because it failed by such a wide margin.

A weekly schedule released by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Friday afternoon did not give a specific time for a vote on trade-related legislation.

Obama in a statement Friday afternoon called on the House to pass TAA "as soon as possible" so he can sign both pieces of legislation "and give our workers and businesses even more wind at their backs." The TAA vote failure came despite him making a last-minute plea on Capitol Hill to Democrats to support that component of the trade bill.

But Sessions said that if the TAA vote fails again, he will work in his committee to draft a rule for considering TPA by itself next week, paving the way for a vote on the standalone legislation sometime soon after.

Sessions expressed confidence that there would be sufficient support for TPA on its own, and said the vote in favor of the TPA component of the trade bill on Friday afternoon had demonstrated that.

However, congressional aides acknowledged that this approach would likely delay final approval of TPA. This is because it would not only require drafting a new rule and another vote in the House, but lawmakers would have to hold a conference to reconcile the differences between the House version and the Senate version of the trade bill, which contains both TAA and TPA. After doing so, the House and Senate would then have to vote on the compromise bill.

Gabe Horwitz, director of the economic program at the centrist Third Way think tank, said in an interview that there is third option for passing TPA, which is simply for the House to take up the Senate-passed TPA-TAA bill under a rule that provides for a single vote on the entire bill, instead of splitting it up into two parts.

Asked why that would not lead to more defections from House Republicans who oppose TAA, Horwitz said conservative Republicans have already been given a chance to vent their opposition to TAA. He noted that the House Republican leadership has in several previous instances forced members into line after allowing them a a vote to blow off steam, as was the case with the debt ceiling and the budget.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), a vice-chair of the New Democrat Coalition, told reporters Friday that he expects the 28 Democrats who voted in favor of TPA will continue to support the bill with or without renewal of the worker retraining program. While Connolly said that he supports TAA and wants it to be renewed, he will not withhold support for TPA if members of his own caucus vote TAA down twice. He said he believes other Democratic supporters of TPA feel the same.

Connolly also hinted he believed Republicans could come out in stronger numbers to pass TPA if they calculated it to be necessary. He noted that the Republican conference had shown extraordinary "discipline" in pushing 86 members of their caucus in the Friday vote to support TAA, a program the party in general has long reviled. Kind noted the previous "high water mark" for Republican votes in support of the program was around 35. Thirty-eight Republicans voted for the most recent standalone TAA renewal in 2007.

Sessions, Connolly and Kind all tried to frame the vote on TAA as a vote to save the program. Sessions said Democrats now face the choice of whether they want the retraining program to be part of the trade package or not.

Kind told reporters that he hoped having a break over the weekend would allow members to "calm down" and hear appeals from the White House and pro-TPA Democrats to approve TAA. He pointed to the approaching Sept. 30 expiration of funding for TAA, and implied that the invocation of this deadline by TPA supporters would help them make progress in the vote count. Obama alluded to this deadline in his statement.

The New Democrat Coalition chairman argued repeatedly in comments to reporters Friday that if the TAA vote fails, the program will likely go away completely. While sources said that argument was resonating with some lawmakers, it clear was not resonating with others.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), a co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), which whipped against the TAA vote, said that argument is not credible because the president could demand that TAA reauthorization accompany an implementing bill for a completed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

"If TAA goes down and TPA comes up, and then the President gets his Trans-Pacific Partnership ... he could say, I will not sign this bill unless you give me a trade adjustment bill. He could do that," Ellison said. "So all of this is sort of like, 'come on.' This is all maneuvering. To say that we'll never see Trade Adjustment Assistance again, it's just not credible.”

"If all these multinationals who want the Trans-Pacific Partnership so bad ... they will talk to their partners in Congress and say, 'Give [TAA] to them,'" Ellison said. He opposed both TPA and TAA.

Three of the 77 signatories of the CPC's June 11 letter indicating opposition for the TAA renewal ended up voting in favor of the program on Friday. They were Reps. Jim Himes (D-CT), John Larson (D-CT) and Rick Larsen (D-WA).

A CPC spokesman, pointing to this figure, said that the caucus is "optimistic the next vote will closely mirror the last one.”

The White House will likely be making a "long-distance" effort over the weekend to reach members in their districts and shore up support for TAA, the pro-trade Democratic aide said.

CPC Vice Chairman Mark Pocan (D-WI), who voted against both TPA and TAA, said that many members were making their decisions based on what they were hearing in their own districts, rather than taking into account the "inside the Beltway" discussion. "This is something people really feel strongly about back home, and I think most people are doing what they're hearing in their districts," Pocan said.

The aide said that the fact that members were returning to the districts would not help the White House, but did not outright say it would be a problem in its whipping efforts.
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