Actually, that's not true, as forty-seven out of fifty-three Pachyderms voted in favor of free trade via the Trade Promotion Authority Act (Wyoming's Mike Enzi was absent), which passed the Senate yesterday by an overall margin of 62-37, which means thirty-one out of forty-six Democrats voted against it, and the media isn't posting headlines like "Senate Trade Vote Highlights Rift Among Democrats". I suppose Newsmax's excuse was that an 8-1 margin is a "rift" when Republicans are in the majority. The Democrats had a 2-1 margin in the other direction, but I guess that didn't count.
Perhaps it was the stature of the leader of what would have been dubbed the "Gang of Six" if the TPAA had been shot down:
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions slammed the bill because it would further destroy U.S. jobs and lacks strong provisions to hold foreign companies accountable for violating international trade law.
"Stubbornly, our political elites have treated trade as a matter of religion," Sessions said. "To them, there is no such thing as a bad deal. They know American workers lose jobs when we allow trading partners to cheat. But they insist it is all for the greater good.
"We have allowed state-dominated and mercantilist trading partners to maintain their varied and elaborate non-tariff barriers, exporting their unemployment to our shores.
"This is why the American worker keeps ending up on the losing end," Sessions said.
I love Jeff Sessions. On immigration policy, this argument is spot-on, because illegal aliens - and legal immigrants - erode both the American economy and the very existence of citizenship and national sovereignty. But on international trade, he's out to lunch. So the best way of combating state-dominated and mercantilist trading partners and their elaborate non-tariff barriers is to become state-dominated and mercantilist ourselves, and raise our own non-tariff trading barriers in retaliation? We did try a very similar option once, about eighty-four years ago; it was called the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which triggered further retaliation from our trading partners, sending the First World (and the rest of the world along with it) spiraling down into the (First) Great Depression that fertilized the ground for the rise of the regimes that plunged the world into its second global war in a generation. I'd ask how that turned out, but I beat myself to it.
Tom Cotton of Arkansas provided a great rebuttal:
"Trade promotion authority is a valuable economic tool, but it is important for Congress to retain oversight of the administration's negotiations," the first-term Republican said. "This legislation allows for both.
"Most importantly, it ensures that products produced or grown in Arkansas have increased access to world markets," Cotton said.
Okay, so it wasn't a great rebuttal. But it got the point across.
Free trade is not a "matter of religion"; it is capitalism, and capitalism is the one thing that really shouldn't have borders. In fact, it can't have borders if you want more of it. That's the principle that the TPAA upholds, and that's why everyone from Tea Party stalwarts like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (well, he was one, once) to RINOs like Orrin Hatch and John McCain voted for it. And besides, don't we already have enough state domination and mercantilism because of Barack Obama?
Of course, The One is the big drawback to the TPAA. The last thing the American dictator needs is to be given even more power. And it's an eminently safe assumption that his infernal majesty will use the TPAA in precisely the way that trade warriors on both sides want, so I don't know about what Senator Sessions is grousing. And isn't the co-belligerency of Jeff Sessions, Rand Paul, and eventual 2016 Democrat presidential nominee Elizabeth Warren a redefinition of the expression "strange bedfellows"?
But in form, the TPAA - and every piece of trade authority legislation - is very much like the Patriot Act, which, back in 2001, Democrats opposed for at least one of the same reasons that Senator Sessions' "Gang Of Six" opposes the TPAA: empowering an opposition president to do things you don't want done. Believe me, I get that. But in both cases, PA and TPAA were and are the right things to do on principle. The former was a necessary, common-sensical measure to enable the federal government to perform its primary function: Protect the States against external threats, this one coming at us in a mode and manner never before encountered on such a large scale. Did it enact powers that a future president could abuse? The potential was there, and it's been realized over the past six and a half years. But that speaks to the duty of voters to be vigilant in ensuring that a wannabe despot never swindles his or her way to power, not the non-existent "necessity" to turn the Constitution into a suicide pact. In the same way, free trade deals cannot have five hundred and thirty five negotiators, or there wouldn't be any free trade. And voter vigilance, here as there and overall, plays a critical role; just as We, The People, should not, through the Electoral College, elect presidents that will eviscerate civil liberties, nor should we elect presidents that will wage the only kind of war that should never, under any circumstances, be waged, because "trade wars" are invariably futile and self-defeating.
And, just to touch the last base, if the TPAA was an Article II, Section II, Clause II treaty ratification power issue, do you really think Ted Cruz would have voted for it?
It's a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will not use the TPAA to advance free trade (thus, his ire at Fauxcahontas's evident obtusity). But if there are presidents after the Chicago Cherubim, they will likely use that authority toward the intended goal: the revival of the former global engine of prosperity known as the U.S. economy, and the resurrection of the fabled golden goose.
Having said all that, TPAA will probably be DOA in the House. But we can always hope.
And we'd damn well better.
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