[CTC] House Moves to Delay Action on Trade Bill for 6 Weeks

[Arthur Stamoulis]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/house-moves-to-delay-action-on-trade-bill-for-6-weeks.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150616&nlid=46745373&tntemail0=y <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/house-moves-to-delay-action-on-trade-bill-for-6-weeks.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150616&nlid=46745373&tntemail0=y>
 
House Moves to Delay Action on Trade Bill for 6 Weeks

 
The New York Times
By Jennifer Steinhauer
June 16, 2015
 
WASHINGTON — The House voted convincingly Tuesday to allow Congress six more weeks to ponder ways to get a trade bill toPresident Obama <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>’s desk before the August recess, just days after Democrats delivered an embarrassing defeat to the administration’s economic policy agenda.

House Republicans were set to take another vote on Trade Adjustment Assistance, which provides relief for workers displaced by global trade pacts. Democrats have long supported such programs, but last Friday voted against it as a way of undermining the president’s push for accelerated negotiating authority known as fast track.

Unions and environmental groups strongly opposed giving the president fast-track authority to negotiate a broader agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, because they say it would hurt American workers and loosen environmental safeguards. The proposed global accord, which would affect 40 percent of the world’s economy, would tie together 12 nations along the Pacific Ocean.

House Speaker John A. Boehner <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/john_a_boehner/index.html?inline=nyt-per> instead pivoted to an interim measure to extend that vote until the end of July, when other measures like the highway funding program will be close to expiration. The vote was 236 to 189.

The delay could enable lawmakers to tie the trade program to other more popular measures later this summer as a way of luring approval from reluctant members of both parties.

“We remain committed to getting T.P.A. done,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, “and this will give the president more time to communicate the consequences of not moving forward with his party.”

Another possibility under discussion would be to vote for a bill that only includes the accelerated authority for the president, decoupling it from the worker assistance provision.

This would place the Senate, which has already passed its own trade package, in the position of negotiating with the House for a final package that did not include workers assistance that Democrats have backed for four decades. In an odd twist, the White House might quietly endorse this strategy because Mr. Obama is eager to get the trade deal done.

“I don’t think there’s a deadline,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, who has supported previous trade deals. “I don’t think anyone is going to walk away from the table.”

Yet Tuesday morning, many Democrats continued to rail against it. “We don’t want to give up our leverage, that’s the key point,” said Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan, at a news conference speaking for more than a dozen House Democrats.

Given the complex dynamics on trade, it was unclear whether Republicans would approve the extension of the vote on trade adjustment assistance, which will be attached to an unrelated intelligence measure. But in the end, they went for it.

Most in the party have generally been opposed to trade adjustment assistance, arguing that it is a costly and unproven program. Many are not eager to cast a yes vote for a procedural measure to move it back to the House floor.

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, suggested Tuesday that Mr. Obama’s efforts to win support from House Democrats might have cooled for now. “I don’t expect a lot of arm twisting” over trade at the White House congressional picnic on Wednesday, he said.

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.citizenstrade.org/pipermail/ctcfield-citizenstrade.org/attachments/20150616/f6e76f4f/attachment-0001.htm>