[CTC] Trade Authority Bill Wins Final Approval in Senate

[Arthur Stamoulis]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/business/trade-pact-senate-vote-obama.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/business/trade-pact-senate-vote-obama.html>

Trade Authority Bill Wins Final Approval in Senate

By JONATHAN WEISMAN

JUNE 24, 2015 WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday gave final
approval to legislation granting President Obama enhanced power to
negotiate major trade agreements with Asia and Europe, sending the
president’s biggest end-of-term legislative priority to the White
House for his signature.

Senators then approved a bill that provides assistance to workers
displaced by international trade accords, attaching it to a popular
African trade measure that will go to the House for a final vote
Thursday morning. House Democrats signaled they would support the
measure, which they had voted down two weeks before.

The burst of legislative action secured a hard-fought victory for Mr.
Obama and the Republican congressional leadership. It kept on track
an ambitious agenda to complete a broad trade agreement joining 12
countries — from Canada and Chile to Australia and Japan — into a web
of rules governing trans-Pacific commerce. Negotiators will also move
forward on an accord with Europe, knowing that any agreement over the
next six years will be subject to a straight up-or-down vote, but
cannot be amended or filibustered in Congress.

The Senate cleared the so-called trade promotion bill 60 to 38, with
13 Democrats joining all but five Republicans. After the Senate voted
76 to 22 to cut off debate on the worker aid and African trade bill,
senators agreed to pass it by voice vote.

“This is a critical day for our country,” said Senator Orrin G.
Hatch, Republican of Utah and chairman of the Senate Finance
Committee, who called trade promotion authority “the most important
bill we’ll do this year.”

“It’s taken a while to get here, longer than many of us would have
liked,” he added, “but anything worth doing takes effort.”

Final passage does not guarantee the president’s completion of the
more imminent Trans-Pacific Partnership, seen as a central element of
the White House’s strategic shift toward Asia. Negotiations with
Europe over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership have
further to go.

But the Obama administration and its trading partners saw approval of
fast-track negotiating power as a vital prerequisite. Countries like
Japan and Australia refused to make the politically precarious
compromises necessary to complete the trade deals until they knew
that Congress could not amend the final agreement and ask for
additional negotiations.

At the same time, the trade promotion bill, hashed out over months of
arduous negotiations, adds new hurdles to completion. Under the
legislation, the president may not even sign a final agreement for
two months, and Congress cannot consider the deal for two additional
months while the public gets its first complete look at the accord.
That delay will most likely push any consideration of the Pacific
accord well into the presidential election season, a difficult
political environment in which to consider the largest trade
agreement since the North American Free Trade Agreement.

A separate bill bolstering trade enforcement rules — set for final
passage in July — includes measures added late in the process to win
conservative support, further complicating the president’s job. They
include a provision prohibiting any trade agreement from forcing
action by the United States on climate change and another forbidding
trade accords to include provisions easing immigration and visa
rules.

The dislocated worker bill swings the Democrats’ direction. Such
trade adjustment assistance programs have existed since the Kennedy
administration, but pro-trade Democrats demanded a significant
expansion as a price for their support for fast track. The bill
extends assistance through June 2022, with an expansion of the
program through June 2021. That includes $2.7 billion in funds for
worker retraining and education, and a provision that for the first
time makes workers in service industries eligible for a program once
reserved for out-of-work manufacturing workers.

The bill extends and expands a tax credit for the purchase of health
insurance, and it includes subsidies for the wages of workers 50 or
older who were forced to find lower-paid jobs than the ones they lost
to international competition.

This month, House Democrats voted down that measure when it was
attached to enhanced trade negotiating powers, hoping that by
defeating that part of the bill, they could derail the entire trade
package.

That prompted Republican leaders — with the support of the White
House — to break apart those two measures and approve them separately
over the last two weeks. After meeting as a caucus Wednesday morning,
House Democrats decided they could no longer oppose worker assistance
knowing that voting it down would have no impact on a trade promotion
authority bill heading to the president regardless.

Senior Democrats said they would now focus their pressure on the
Trans-Pacific Partnership itself.

“My responsibility is to have a unified caucus and try to focus on
what we have to do next, which is to make sure T.P.P. is a great
agreement,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California
and the House minority leader, who formally announced her support for
the worker aid measure in a letter to the House Democratic Caucus on
Wednesday. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

Democrats remain bitter about the turn of events since June 12, when
they thought they had won.

Like Ms. Pelosi, Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota
and one of the architects of the plan to scuttle the trade package by
voting down the worker assistance program, conceded defeat. “Beyond a
symbolic expression of resolve, I don’t see the point of fighting,”
he said.

The votes were an enormous victory not only for the president and
Republican leaders but also for big businesses, agriculture
interests, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, which pressed hard to keep
the trade agenda moving. Global commerce has bolstered corporate
profitability and expanded markets for farmers, but the American
market remains more open than many of the United States’ trading
partners’.

“Our leaders in Washington proved they could tune out the populists
and demagogues of the left and the right and take action on an
important measure to put our economy back on track,” said Thomas J.
Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It was also a defeat for environmental groups, liberal activists,
some Tea Party conservatives and, most of all, organized labor, which
spent millions of dollars and used enormous organizational muscle
pressuring lawmakers and trying to kill the trade measure. Unions
strongly maintain that since the North American Free Trade Agreement
of 1993, trade agreements have sent millions of high-paying
manufacturing jobs overseas while depressing wages at home.

As for the Pacific trade deal, many issues remain, including access
to Japanese auto and agriculture markets, Australian concerns over
pharmaceutical demands for access to government health insurance,
labor rights for workers at Vietnamese state-owned enterprises and
the stewardship of Peru’s rain forests.

“I’m going to work harder than ever to bring about a real
confrontation on these issues,” said Representative Sander Levin of
Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee
and a leading critic of the Pacific trade agreement. “I don’t look on
this as the end of the discussion.”
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