AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Editor's Note: On the afternoon of June 12, the House defeated Trade Adjustment Assistance, 302 to 126 with only 40 Democrats voting in favor. Although House Speaker John Boehner vows to hold another vote on TAA next week following the House's passage of trade promotion authority, also on June 12, the vote puts the larger Trans-Pacific Partnership into serious jeopardy.
It's now looking increasingly like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will go down to defeat.
The first hurdle is the House vote scheduled for Friday on trade promotion authority, popularly known as fast-track, giving the executive branch an up-or-down vote in Congress on its Pacific trade deal.
In recent days, as President Obama turned up the heat on about a dozen House Democrats, it looked as if supporters of fast track were closing in on a bare majority if 218 House votes-mostly from Republicans.
But last night, actually at about 2 a.m. Thursday morning, the House Republican Caucus made several decisions that will likely increase opposition among Democrats and Republicans alike.
In a complex parliamentary maneuver, Speaker John Boehner linked two other bills to the fast track vote, encumbering the measure with provisions that Democrats can't support.
One is a feeble version of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), capped at just $350 million. Even worse, the TAA funding is paid for by Medicare cuts, though Boehner has promised the Democrats that this measure will be later repealed in favor of $350 million to be conjured from tougher tax enforcement.
But TAA, which compensates U.S. workers deemed to have been displaced by the trade deal, is highly unpopular with Republicans. Although Boehner thinks he has upwards of 200 Republican votes for fast track, a far smaller number of GOP members are likely to vote for TAA. And if Democrats seize the moment and vote tactically, they could vote against the TAA measure as well, thus killing the larger deal.
Boehner has promised House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi that if TAA doesn't pass, he won't even bring up fast track for a vote.
But the problems don't end there. In another companion measure on trade enforcement, Republicans added a wish list of measures to the package of bills. These include a provision prohibiting the president from including climate change remediation in any trade agreement, as well as anti-immigrant language.
These new measures add up to a kind of poison pill for Democrats. The bandwagon effect to support Obama has now been stopped dead in its tracks. Outraged environmental and immigrant groups have redoubled their pressure on Democrats to oppose fast track-and Boehner can't produce enough GOP votes from his own caucus to pass it with Republicans alone.
Even if fast track does surmount these several hurdles, it is a long way from that vote to final approval of the Pacific trade deal.
First, the House and Senate versions of trade negotiating authority have to be reconciled. That will be its own parliamentary mess, with different provisions in the two houses on hot-button issues such as currency manipulation. Even if House-Senate reconciliation is achieved, Congress has yet to turn its attention to the substance of the deal.
Negotiations with other Pacific nations have been suspended, pending the fast track vote. The deal is far from complete. And only when the text is finalized, will Congress get its first look at the actual agreement.
Leaked drafts have produced huge opposition among Democrats and some Republicans. Although Friday's vote is on "fast track," the debate about the content of the Pacific deal will be anything but fast. The real debate begins when the draft agreement is made public.
It's generally conceded that if the Pacific deal does not pass Congress in 2015, it is dead-since Republican will not give President Obama a victory in an election year.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was intended to be President Obama's legacy on trade. The legacy could well turn out to be an epitaph for Wall Street special-interest deals disguised as free trade.
