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“<b><i>The issue is blurring all kinds of lines. Along with both unions and the “Middle American Radical,” Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz all oppose the pact</i></b>.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>The GOP’s Growing Rift on Trade</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">National Journal<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">By Alex Rogers<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">December 15, 2015<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/126106/gops-growing-rift-trade?mref=daily_mc">http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/126106/gops-growing-rift-trade?mref=daily_mc</a>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">The Republican Party has split anew on one of its core tenets—free trade—and the question is how long the war will last.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">While the GOP has largely supported free trade for over three decades, its top-tier presidential candidates are split on the recently-struck Pacific trade accord, the most significant in a generation. And Donald Trump,
the GOP front-runner, has been labeled by <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> as potentially the most protectionist nominee since Herbert Hoover.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">The Trumped-up rhetoric on closing down the borders—both to humans and to trade—is so divisive that it endangers a split within the party, says Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who founded the Committee to
Unleash Prosperity with Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, and Arthur Laffer. He thinks Trump’s candidacy pits a pessimistic, “1950s-style” Republican populist wing versus an optimistic, free-market wing of the party.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">“Here’s my big worry right now, as you follow what’s happened in the last year or so and especially in the last six weeks or so,” said Moore in a phone interview. “I’m very nervous that Republicans are becoming a kind of
‘close the border’ party—close the border to people, close the border to goods and services. And that’s bad economics. It’s terrible economics. And that’s the wrong direction.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">“I worry that the party is going down this Pat Buchanan wing of the party—that’s now the Donald Trump wing—is ascendant,” added Moore. “There’s now becoming a rift within the party between the ‘build the wall’ party and the—I
think—the party Reagan [built.]”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">More than 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan campaigned on a North America Free Trade Agreement and, when he became president, entered the U.S. into the first free trade agreement with Israel. His emphasis on expanding trade
and lowering trade barriers in an effort to increase economic growth and create better paying jobs stuck with the establishment wing of the party. In 2012, the GOP platform stated: “A Republican President will complete negotiations for
a Trans-Pacific Partnership to open rapidly developing Asian markets to U.S. products. Beyond that, we envision a worldwide multilateral agreement among nations committed to the principles of open markets, what has been called a ‘Reagan
Economic Zone,’ in which free trade will truly be fair trade for all concerned.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">Yet of the nine top-tier candidates taking the GOP presidential debate stage Tuesday night, at least four oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Congressional approval for TPP, which was recently reached by the U.S.
and 11 other countries around the Pacific Rim, is under severe political pressure. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he is “disappointed” but undecided on the agreement—and warned President Obama that voting on
his potentially last legacy-defining achievement should wait until after the 2016 election.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">“I think he ought to take into account the obvious politics of trade at the moment in our country,” McConnell said at a <i>Politico</i>-sponsored breakfast.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
The issue is blurring all kinds of lines. Along with both unions and the “Middle American Radical,” Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz all oppose the pact.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
The vast majority of Democrats in Congress oppose the agreement, as they think TPP would outsource American jobs and depress wages. Republicans are split. Many are particularly
<span style="color:black">skeptical of this agreement because it was negotiated under the Obama administration, which has deemed TPP the most progressive pact in U.S. history, and are concerned it places burdensome environmental and labor
regulations. McConnell and the North Carolina GOP congressional delegation have concerns about various tobacco provisions, and some Republicans, particularly Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, believe the intellectual-property protections
for pharmaceutical companies producing biologic drugs aren’t strong enough.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">But other conservatives are keen on lowering tariffs and taking advantage of greater economic trade with the Pacific nations surrounding China. Grover Norquist, the chief of Americans for Tax Reform, supports the
pact, while acknowledging flaws in intellectual-property provisions, among others.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">“This is both sound foreign policy and it’s great economic policy,” Norquist told<i>National Journal</i>. “It’s 4,000 pages of tax cuts. Tariffs … tariffs suck. Tariffs kill jobs. Tariffs slow the economy. This is good.
It’s not everything you wanted—no. But it’s progress towards almost everything you wanted.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">The GOP opposition, in his mind, “has everything to do with who wrote it and not what’s in it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white">
<span style="color:black">Whether this juncture signifies a greater surge in the populist wing of the GOP—or merely measures a passing moment, as others have before—is up for debate.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:justify;background:white;border:none;padding:0in">
<span style="color:black">“There’s a Buchanan wing that’s been anti-trade, anti-immigrant for quite some time, and we’re just seeing another round of that in Cruz and in Trump,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the director of domestic and economic policy
for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Holtz-Eakin, who served in George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, can remember the Republican-led House’s squeaker vote in 2002 granting the White House enhanced trade-negotiating powers.
“Not a new phenomenon. Visible on the campaign trail—I don’t disagree with that. It’s been around before.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There are corporatists and populists in both political parties, in the Democratic and the Republican caucuses in Congress; and the popular opposition to the TPP, while heavily weighted to the progressive constituencies and their coalitions,
nonetheless includes some important, if partial, critiques from socially conservative and libertarian perspectives. This minority opinion among Republicans could have outsize influence in the upcoming trade policy debates.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One fair trade sentiment where left meets right is preservation of Buy American protectionism; almost everybody loves keeping our tax dollars spent at home and opposes liberalization of the government procurement obligations. Another is
the outrage against the human rights records of our TPP partners. Listen to Phyllis Schafly of the Eagle Forum (“leading the pro-family movement since 1972”) as she warns members of her own political tribe that they shouldn’t enable President Obama to pass
the TPP: <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><i>Some of the eleven TPP countries are notorious for their persecution of Christians, including Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam. Brunei, for example […] has a constitution that states: “The religion of Brunei Darussalam
shall be the Muslim religion,” which means Islamic Sharia law supersedes all other law and regulates all aspects of life […]. Christians and their clergy are harassed at every turn in Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Spies attend nearly every Christian gathering.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yet another shared concern across a trans-partisan spectrum is the assault on sovereignty that the ISDS sections of both TPP and TTIP represent. For progressives, sovereignty refers to self-determination and local democratic control, the
immunity that sub-federal governments enjoy from direct corporate claims under secretive trade pacts. For conservatives, ISDS is an affront to the American judicial system, Article III of the Constitution and our rich jurisprudence, because it sets up secretive
tribunals for foreign investors to make claims against U.S. taxpayers<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Way on the Right, at the lunatic fringe, you run into anti-“free trade” groups like the Wisconsin-based John Birch Society, founded in 1958 to fight the Communist menace, standing for “less government, more responsibility and¯ with God’s
help¯a better world.” Nowadays, JBS has expanded its global government conspiracy theories to encompass the TPP/TTIP axis. The demographic of this wing of the anti free-trade grassroots crusade is different from the progressive Fair Trade movement, and so
is their worldview. The paranoid bandwagons of the right rail against “big government” and therefore miss the real enemies to democracy ¯namely, big multinational corporations. As the Director of Missions forewarns in
<u>Free Trade Deception Almost No One Understands</u>: <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><i>“While you’re being told that these free trade agreements will bring prosperity, they are actually being used by establishment elites to create economically and politically integrated blocs of nations that can
be knit together into a New World Order. This means that the TPP and TTIP trade pacts are a direct threat to our national independence and personal freedoms […]. Today, the TTIP agreement represents an attempt by European and American establishment elites
to merge the United States with the EU; the TPP is an attempt to economically and politically integrate the United States with eleven Pacific Rim nations.”<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Straight parallel lines will never meet, and it remains to be seen whether the ideological spectrum forms a circle, not a line, around the issues of globalization. However, in the ongoing struggle against corporate rule, as Naomi Klein
reminds us, “You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible, knowing that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Today there are fair trade networks that are legitimately trans-partisan, in which differences of opinion on other issues are held in abeyance to permit concerted efforts to fix or nix, repair or replace, the TPP. An example is the Coalition
for a Prosperous America, which includes on its governing board free trade critics from both labor and business, farmers, ranchers, and conservative economists. In the national conversations about working families in the global economy, trade policy reform
cuts across party lines more than any other.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:"Bell MT","serif"">Michael F. Dolan, J.D.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Bell MT","serif"">Legislative Representative<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Bell MT","serif"">International Brotherhood of Teamsters<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Bell MT","serif"">Desk 202.624.6891<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Bell MT","serif"">Fax 202.624.8973<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Bell MT","serif"">Cell 202.437.2254<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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