Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the news conference unveiling the articles of impeachment, December 10, 2019
In the climactic scene of The Godfather, Michael Corleone attends the baptism of his sister Connie’s baby, as his henchmen ritually slaughter all the heads of New York’s Five Families. Corleone tightened his control over organized crime while standing in church, quietly renouncing Satan.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pulled off the Corleone strategy. She used the introduction of articles of impeachment (the baptism) as cover to secure major deals on trade, drug prices, immigration, and defense, all in the same day and at the same time. While those not distracted by the holidays fixated on the impeachment drama, Pelosi settled the fights raging among the Democratic caucus all year. And though progressives didn’t get completely rolled, there are consequences to the Pelosi blitz that will reverberate in the 2020 elections, and for decades into the future.
Let’s start with the successful power play from the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), who forced Pelosi to the negotiating table and won a couple long-sought changes to her top priority, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act. That probably matters far more than the substance of the compromise, especially since this bill is going nowhere fast in the Senate.
Pelosi was content and in fact gleeful to ignore CPC co-chairs, Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), believing she could muscle the bill through and crush the rebellion, the same way she froze out progressives all year on drug prices. Jayapal and Pocan, ridiculed by anonymous Pelosi aides, remained firm, finding the votes necessary to tank the bill and leveraging that into a negotiation. That means something for the future; progressives must be respected in policymaking. “This is a huge win, and it shows what we can do when we stick together and all push hard for the American people,” says Jayapal in a statement to the Prospect.
All that said, even the CPC statement acknowledges, “We didn’t get everything we wanted.” The CPC had four priorities going in: Ensure that negotiated prices applied to the uninsured, strike the non-interference clause that bans government price negotiations with drug companies, increase the number of drugs negotiated every year, and restore the Jayapal amendment that caps annual drug price spikes at the rate of inflation in the employer-sponsored plans serving 150 million people. Though the amendment had passed the House Education and Labor Committee, Pelosi watered it down to a study, a common technique to kill a policy. (Incredibly, in a Dear Colleague letter on Monday, Pelosi took credit for including the study.)
In the end, they got two out of four. Under the bill, the government would still negotiate a minimum of 25 drugs in year one, but that would double to 50 in year two and stay constant thereafter (this was a priority for Pocan). And the Jayapal amendment did get restored, in an even stronger fashion than when it passed the Education and Labor Committee. But help for the uninsured did not come. Last Friday I quoted Nicole Smith-Holt, whose uninsured son died from lack of access to insulin. The bill “wouldn’t have saved his life,” Smith-Holt told me. It still won’t.
Of course, the bill won’t save anyone’s life, because it’s not going to become law. This was a messaging bill, strengthened somewhat by CPC leaders who communicated to Pelosi they wouldn’t be ignored and had to be reckoned with. That alone improves the future for progressive priorities.
The other three bills cemented on Tuesday all will likely become law, all with bipartisan votes. First, Pelosi got AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka to sign off on the U.S.–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), handing Trump a political victory on one of his signature issues. Predictably, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham immediately gushed, calling USMCA “the biggest and best trade agreement in the history of the world.”
It’s, um, not that. Economically, USMCA is a nothingburger; even the most rose-colored analysis with doubtful assumptions built in shows GDP growth of only 0.06 percent per year. There’s one good provision: the elimination of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision that allowed corporations to sue governments in secret tribunals over trade violations. There’s one bad provision: the extension of legal immunity for tech platforms over user-generated content, put into a trade deal for the first time. This will make the immunity shield, codified in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, much harder to alter in the future. Pelosi has called this deal a “template” for future agreements, though trade reformers have called it a bare minimum floor.
Pelosi tried to remove the immunity shield, but abandoned the request. She did succeed in removing a provision for Big Pharma that extended exclusivity periods for biologics. The Sierra Club has termed the deal an “environmental failure” that will not have binding standards on clean air and water or climate goals. But the threshold question on the USMCA was always going to be labor enforcement: would the labor laws imposed on Mexico hold, improving their lot while giving U.S. manufacturing workers a chance to compete? There was also the open question of why the U.S. would reward Mexico with a trade deal update when trade unionists in the country continue to be kidnapped and killed.
In his statement, Trumka lauds the labor enforcement, noting provisions that make it easier to prove violations (including violence against workers), rules of evidence for disputes, and inspections of Mexican facilities, a key win. But I’ve been told that the AFL-CIO did not see the details of the text before signing off, which is unforgivable, especially on trade where details matter. There was no vote by union leaders, just a briefing from the AFL-CIO.
At least one union, the Machinists, remains opposed, and others were noncommittal until they see text. The Economic Policy Institute, which is strongly tied to labor, called the agreement “weak tea at best,” a tiny advance on the status quo that will not reverse decades of outsourcing of U.S. jobs.
So why did Trumka, who Pelosi gave the ability to approve or reject the USMCA, decide to support it? Labor has felt self-imposed pressure to say yes to a trade deal, to counter the Chamber of Commerce’s claims that they’re purely contrarian. Trumka may have seen this as minimally harmful and a good way to rebut the charge. Plus, the significant minority of labor’s rank and file’s supports Trump, another cross-pressure that may have been a factor.
While the economics are negligible (and potentially harmful on tech policy), on the politics activists are losing their mind at the prospect of a Trump signing ceremony, with labor by his side, on a deal that he will construe as keeping promises to Midwest voters. “Any corporate Democrat who pushed to get this agreement passed that thinks Donald Trump is going to share the credit for those improvements is dangerously gullible,” said Yvette Simpson, CEO of Democracy for America, in a statement. Only a small handful of Democratic centrists were pushing for a USMCA vote, based mostly on the idea that they had to “do something” to show that they could get things done in Congress. Now they’ve got it, and they’ll have to live with the consequences.
USMCA and the drug bill weren’t the only items Pelosi ticked off on Tuesday. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a perennial passed every year that always includes a vast amount of policymaking, got through a House-Senate conference committee, with a floor vote imminent. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) called the $738 billion authorization “an bill of astonishing moral cowardice.” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came out in opposition as well. Earlier versions included bipartisan bans on using funds for war with Iran or continuing to support the war in Yemen. Both of those were stripped out. Another measure regulating toxic PFAS chemicals as a hazardous substance in drinking water, passed unanimously in the House, also got killed.
Pelosi chalked that up to “Senate GOP obstruction” in a statement, while touting the addition of paid family leave for government employees and the end of the so-called “widow’s tax” for military spouses. There’s one other big win on military procurement, as negotiators kept in an amendment that will allow contracting officers to demand certified cost information for parts and equipment they purchase. This will better ensure reasonable prices by giving the government the data it needs to prevent ripoffs from defense contractors like TransDigm, which according to a February inspector general report received excessive profits with markups up to 4,451 percent on nearly all the products it sold to the government.
Pelosi also moved forward on a controversial farmworkers bill, which will get a floor vote this week. As David Bacon explained for the Prospect, the bill provides a pathway to legal residency for undocumented farmworkers, but maintains and expands guest worker programs that cut down on pay. Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute explains that the bill would codify a Trump administration rule that would force downward wage rates for a majority of migrant guest workers. It’s kind of a devil’s bargain—legal status for some in exchange for lower wages for many.
This spray of year-end legislation comes while the political world is monomaniacally focused on impeachment. The first question Pelosi got at her press conference on USMCA was whether it was a coincidence that the deal timing overlapped with the impeachment articles. “It’s just as we get to the end of a session there have to be decisions made,” she said.
That’s certainly what happened. And if Trump gets re-elected, if Big Tech continues to evade accountability, if imperial adventures continue abroad, if migrant farmworkers cannot feed their families, you can trace it back to this Tuesday, and the actions a House Speaker took while nobody was paying attention.
