Tea Party TPA Opposition Rationale: "Screw Obama"

by JASmius

"Really, Dr. McCoy, you must learn to govern your passions. They will be your undoing."

-Spock of Vulcan, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan


Believe me, my Tea Party friends, I understand the impulse, the reflex, the compulsion.  After six and a half years of Obamunist dictatorship, of "We can't wait!," of "If Congress won't act, I will!", of "I've got a pen and I've got a phone," the notion of congressional Republicans giving O even more plenary executive authority on whatever grounds seems....counter-intuitive at best.

That Pavlovian hair-trigger runs throughout Congressman John Fleming's anti-Boehner rant today:

Representative John Fleming questioned why House Speaker John Boehner and other top Republicans worked feverishly to resuscitate Barack Obama's trade agenda Thursday when "this is a president who criticizes America and seeks to harm America while giving a pass to other countries."

"What's mystifying to me is why our House leadership, Speaker Boehner, want to hand President Obama a huge political victory and at the same time give him a huge new tool that he can use to damage Americans and damage the America economy?" the Louisiana-4 Republican asked in an interview....

"Why would we want to do that, when this man has proven over and over again, through many of his decisions, that he's perfectly willing to harm American workers' jobs, culture and many other aspects of American life?" Fleming asked. "And now, we're just handing him just another huge opportunity to do that."

I'll grant you that Boehner's "feverishness" was more than a little unseemly.  Surely the Speaker could have put a price tag on Republican fast-track support - like, say, withdrawal of O's veto threat against the Defense appropriations bill that he's threatening to kill because it restores Pentagon spending to semi-sane levels.  Then we would have at least seen how truly invested The One was in this Trans-Pacific Partnership business, and if he was, who knows?  House 'Pubbies might even have gotten something in exchange for TPA, as opposed to doing their impression of a Stockholm Syndromized-gulag chain gang.  And if not, then not, and y'all would have been happy and Boehner would be a little be more re-ingratiated with the base.

But what I don't see in any of the rhetoric of the small GOP opposition to TPA is a policy-specific reason for their stance.  Which isn't all that noteworthy, because there isn't any to cite.  And I'm not talking about how Obama would abuse and misuse it.  Once again, every POTUS going back to FDR has had fast-track trade negotiating authority, because you cannot have five hundred thirty five cross-purposed negotiators conducting the negotiations.  It isn't practical.  Without fast track, as has been pointed out repeatedly, there wouldn't be any trade agreements, and the terminus at the end of that road is the sort of global economic collapse that was a major factor in deepening and lengthening the (first) Great Depression.

And yes, the same thing applies to the "It's a treaty!" argument, which I can see intellectually but in practice would wind up in the exact same place.  You know the old saying about the Constitution not being a suicide pact?  Why should it be a bankruptcy declaration either?

Here's another question to consider: Would Congressman Fleming or Senator Sessions be manning the barricades against TPA if Ted Cruz or Scott Walker were in the White House?  If the answer is yes, I could respect their principled consistency even though I would disagree with their stance.  If the answer is no, then their opposition to TPA is not principled, but simple partisanism unmoored from principle.  And as much as I "get that," that's simply not a good enough or sufficient reason to oppose fast-track.

This is why I say that Tea Party opposition to Trade Promotion Authority is doing the wrong thing for the right reason.  It may seem to y'all that you're "Fight!  Fight!  Fighting!" Obama and taking a stand for the Constitution, but what you're really doing is empowering leftwing extremist Democrats to cripple the U.S. economy even more than it already is.

And economic collapse, as I recall, is what brought Franklin Delano Roosevelt to power and put America's flight away from the Constitution into maximum overdrive.  Ditto the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb (i.e. the Panic of 2008) and Barack Obama.  Not a mistake I would think any of you would want to repeat.

Besides, you must know that if congressional Republicans denied Obama TPA, he'd just whip out his pen, phone, and magic putter and seize it anyway.

It makes it difficult for me not to conclude that Tea Partiers are just looking for any excuse to attack their own party yet again - also a mistake that should not be repeated.