[CTC] Trade vote puts Froman on faster track

[Arthur Stamoulis]

http://www.politicopro.com/story/trade/?id=49317 <http://www.politicopro.com/story/trade/?id=49317>
 
 
Trade vote puts Froman on faster track
 
Politico
By Doug Palmer
June 29, 2015
 
If not for fast track, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman’s final months in office might have been easy: No more 14-hour flights to Asia to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks; no more running to Capitol Hill to sell wary lawmakers on the pact.

But after passage last week of a bill to speed up congressional approval of that agreement — the biggest trade deal in history — President Barack Obama’s law school friend will barely have time to finish everything on his agenda before the administration ends.

“We’ve got a lot of pots on the stove,” Froman told POLITICO while watching senators cast their final votes to send the legislation to the president. “We want to get TPP done and through Congress. We want to get TTIP negotiated. We’re going to finish ITA. I’m hoping to finish EGA and TISA.”

Those would be, in order: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement with the European Union, an even bigger pact than the TPP in terms of economic size; the World Trade Organization’s Information Technology Agreement, which covers about 97 percent of world IT trade; the Environmental Goods Agreement, accounting for 86 percent international commerce in green goods; and the 24-party Trade in International Services Agreement, which involves three-quarters of the United States’ gross domestic product and two-thirds of the world’s services, such as banking and communications.

In other words, it’s going to be an exceedingly busy next 18 months.

But first, TPP. Froman could wrap up the talks on the trans-Pacific deal, covering nearly 40 percent of world economic output, this summer, setting the stage for another intense trade debate in Congress and vote on the pact before winter begins. He could finish the equally ambitious agreement with the European Union and the slew of other potential trade deals before leaving office, including an investment pact with China, and work to ensure that World Trade Organization members actually implement an agreement to facilitate cross-border trade.

“Next year, people may be talking about a lame-duck administration, but it’s not going to seem that way to Mike Froman,” said Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “He’s going to continue to have a full plate of work and negotiations and maybe even some new initiatives.”

It would have been a much different situation if Congress had rejected the trade promotion authority bill, which will allow Obama to submit trade agreements to Congress for straight up-or-down votes without any amendments. That easily could have turned the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative into a sleepy backwater, biding time for the next administration, instead of making it the key architect of Obama’s foreign economic policy legacy.

Froman, who just marked his second year on the job, has been running full tilt for months, helping to round up votes for the fast track trade bill with only minimal help from House and Senate Democratic leaders and strident opposition from many in the party. With opponents of the fast track trade bill now shifting their efforts to the defeat of the actual TPP agreement, there’s no sign the frenetic pace will slacken.

“The general rule has been if I’m not abroad at one of these negotiations, I’m spending an awful lot of time on the Hill, and that’ s only become more intense in the last couple of months,” Froman said. “We’ve been going up and meeting with the caucus, the committees, individual members. I’ve been traveling to their districts if they wanted me to come and do events with them, meet with their labor folks and their environmental folks.”

Froman has held more than 350 briefings with lawmakers on the Trans-Pacific Partnership out of the 1,800 his agency has conducted over the past several years, according to the office. That helped produce a respectable 13 Democratic votes for trade promotion authority in the Senate but only 28 in the House in the face of an all-out effort by labor groups to kill the legislation.

But many Democrats complain the administration — and Froman in particular — have not seriously considered their ideas for bettering the Trans-Pacific Partnership, despite the huge number of meetings.

“I would say it was exceedingly disappointing that consultations meant cheerleading sessions, perhaps listening to what we said, but never responding,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) said. “The whole notion that the administration would send over their lawyer for USTR to help reject Democratic amendments [during the Ways and Means markup of the fast track bill] indicated what a one-sided process this was.”

“He was there to pitch it and sell it,” added Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.). “The presentations he gave were all about, ‘We’ll work out those details later.’ Our concerns were up-front concerns.” Grijalva explained that he and other Democrats wanted the bill to be more explicit about requiring labor and environmental protections in the pact.

Still, Froman said he is confident there would be broad support for how the administration has addressed those concerns. “A lot of opposition we heard during this debate on TPP was based on myth and misinformation,” he said. “I can’t wait for this thing to be done and fully out there in public to say, ‘We told you this was going to have fully enforceable and binding labor obligations, and it does.’”

Froman also dismissed Republican concerns that the final deal could stress Democratic priorities at the expense of more traditional free trade objectives, such as eliminating foreign tariffs on U.S. farm and manufactured goods and strengthening intellectual property protections.

“I don’t see it as a trade-off,” he said. “We’re pursuing ambitious comprehensive market access, and we’re going product by product, sometimes line by line to make sure we get the right outcome. I view raising labor and environmental standards as a part of our effort to level the playing field. And I think Republicans also care about leveling the playing field for American workers and American firms.”

Froman’s northern California upbringing might have given him a different perspective than the rank-and-file union member in the industrial Midwest worried about losing his or her job to cheap overseas labor. Froman’s father fled Nazi Germany and built a small business, Braverman’s Furniture Store, in San Anselmo, Calif., which he ran until his retirement in 1996; Froman’s mother taught elementary school.

“I grew up working in the store,” Froman said. “I spent my summers when I was younger, cleaning, vacuuming, dusting and when I got older actually delivering furniture on the truck,” Froman recalled. “I wouldn’t say I got a huge background in international trade from that job, but watching my father deal with the kind of challenges small businesses face — meeting a payroll, managing employees — it gives you a sensitivity about how important they are to the community. At least where I grew up, they were the backbone of the community. There weren’t big companies in the community. It was all small businesses, locally owned.”

Froman went to Princeton and received a doctorate in international relations at Oxford before attending Harvard Law School, which had a program in negotiations, an area he studied as a undergraduate. Although he focused on international law, he learned enough about negotiations to become a teacher’s aide for one of the courses taught by Roger Fisher, a pioneer in the field.

Before graduating, Froman interned in Tokyo and Brussels, two places he visits frequently for negotiations on the historic trade pacts with the Asia-Pacific and the EU. He and his wife, Nancy Goodman, also worked in Albania to help modernize the country’s legal system and end Albanian blood feuds — good training, perhaps, for Democratic infighting on trade.

From there, Froman went to work on international economic policy at the White House and Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, leaving at the end of the administration to become a top executive at Citigroup. He served on Obama’s transition team in 2008 and shortly after joined the White House as deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, where he played a huge rule in trade policy before becoming U.S. trade representative in 2013.

While Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), two major critics of Obama’s trade agenda, both voted against Froman’s nomination, Irish rock star Bono called Froman — who was a drummer in his youth and whose 12-year-old son formed a rock band called Twenty20 with the children of other past and present White House officials — an “inspired choice” for trade representative because of the Californian’s belief that trade can be an important tool for development.

Froman has spent countless hours crisscrossing the globe to iron out the details of the Asia-Pacific and European trade deals, and he faces more travel ahead. A trans-Pacific trade deal by mid-August would set the stage for Obama and the leaders of the other TPP countries to shake hands on the pact by November, when they will be in the Philippines for their annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.

“The truth is, I am sufficiently sleep-deprived that I often look forward to these long flights as a way of catching up,” Froman said. “I do prepare for my meetings, but I tend to relax. During a 12-hour flight or a 14-hour flight, it’s a great luxury in my view to get eight or nine hours of sleep.”

There were many long days and late nights during the last few months of debate over Trade Promotion Authority, including a pair of gut-wrenching moments in the Senate and House, when it appeared Democrats were successful in defeating the bill. But Froman insisted he never despaired: “You can’t do my job without being optimistic. You have to be optimistic. And I was optimistic it would happen in the end, but we also knew it was going to be extremely difficult.”

Ultimately, the final Senate vote was anti-climatic, with only a simple majority needed after meeting the 60-vote threshold Tuesday to limit debate on the bill. Froman frequently broke off the conversation to keep an eye on the tally. “Fifty-one. The bill passes,” he said, savoring the moment with his chief spokesman Matthew McAlvanah. “All right. There you go. We can officially say TPA is done.”

A day earlier, there was a bit more anxiety: The "yes" tally “seemed to be stuck at 59,” Froman said. “We were all wondering who were the five senators who hadn’t voted yet.” When Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) became the deciding vote, giving the White House trade promotion authority for the first time since July 1, 2007, “it was a great moment,” Froman said.

Looking ahead, the administration has learned from the past battle and will be better prepared for the looming fight over the trans-Pacific trade pact, he said.

“Certainly, with regard to TPP, we’ve already laid the groundwork in this debate …” Froman said. “We’re going to be very proactive about continuing to make the case for TPP.”

Sander Levin (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee and a party leader on trade, said Froman and the administration are imperiling the chances of the pact’s approval by failing to address an array of Democratic, environmental and labor concerns as well as those of health advocates, who worry about the deal’s impact on the prices of medicine.

“I think there’s a failure to heed these red flags,” Levin said. The White House’s narrow victory on fast track “was a very strong signal that these negotiations are on the wrong track, and I would think the administration would try to heed that signal and try now to tackle the main outstanding issues in a way that would make good trade policy. We’ll see.”

But Froman, the man whose job it is to be optimistic, said he was hopeful the administration could hold onto the 28 Democrats who voted for fast track once the actual TPP agreement goes before Congress, and possibly pick up additional support.

“We can’t take them for granted,” Froman said. “They’re going to want to see what’s in TPP itself. But nor do I see that as a ceiling because there were a lot of Democrats who said, ‘Don’t count me out on TPP. I want to see what’s in it. I fundamentally agree with you on the substance, but the politics are just too hard on TPA.’”


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