One lesson this trade deal Sturm und Drang teaches is how a jumble of very similar sounding acronyms can quickly become hopelessly jumbled and confused. Let's take a moment to straighten them out, shall we?
TPA - Trade Promotion Authority, or "fast track," whereby a president is authorized by Congress to plenarily negotiate trade deals subject to up or down approval of Congress. In essence, treaty ratifications without the required two-thirds ratification supermajority. I'm not sure what makes trade deals different from treaties, but there you go. POTUS's have been consistently granted such fast track authority for decades.
TAA - Trade Adjustment Assistance. Basically a sop to Big Labor to finance job retraining for all the employees they imagine will be pink-slipped by the uncompetitively high labor costs unions inflict on U.S. businesses and industry relative to our more capitalistic trading partners.
TPP - Trans-Pacific Partnership: The actual trade deal Barack Obama wants, which is transparent as a light-year of carbon neutronium and pumped full of all manner of leftwingnut shenanigans on immigration and "climate change" and Frigg knows what else.
I wanted to clarify the terms of this discussion because Senator Ted Cruz, whom I noted a few weeks ago voted for TPA in the Senate, himself provided clarification on where he respectively stands on them yesterday:
Historically, since FDR virtually every president has had fast track authority. What fast track provides is simply if a free trade agreement is negotiated, that Congress will vote on it up or down without amendments and history has demonstrated for the last eighty years that the only way to get free trade agreements adopted is to have fast track. That if there is no fast track, free trade agreements do not end up being negotiated.
TPA is what the Senate voted on recently. I voted in favor of fast track because I support free trade. I think free trade benefits America. It creates jobs — opening markets to our farmers, to our ranchers, to our manufacturers, improves economic growth. In Texas alone, roughly three million jobs depend on international trade.
And if you support free trade, the only way history has shown free trade agreements get negotiated is through fast track.
Now there is a second issue which has caused a great deal of confusion and that is TPP…it is one specific trade deal that is being negotiated. It is separate from TPA. Congress has not voted on TPP, and there’s a great deal of concern about TPP. [emphases added]
Doesn't sound to me like TPP is something Senator Cruz would be overly inclined to support. And judging by TPA's travails, I seriously doubt that there'd be enough votes in the House to approve any trade deal The One concocted.
Which, in turn, illustrates that the trade "civil war" is on the Democrat side of the aisle:
The latest: Dem Representative Sander Levin — the ranking Democrat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and a well-respected lawmaker on trade and labor issues — plans to vote No on a key measure related to trade, a spokesperson for Levin confirms to me. That could prove to be a serious blow.
Levin will vote No on so-called Trade Adjustment Assistance, a measure that would give aid to workers displaced by trade, his spokesman, Caroline Behringer, tells me. “Mr. Levin plans to vote No on TAA,” she emails.
This suggests that the strategy that liberal Democrats and labor unions have employed to kill Fast Track may be working. As I reported the other day, a bloc of liberal House Dems, allied with unions, have been working to turn House Democrats against TAA, as a back-door way to bring down Fast Track, and with it, the whole deal. The administration says it needs Fast Track to seal the final agreement.
So leftwingnuts aren't buying the "sop"; by their lights, they reason that if there's no free trade deal, there's no need for TAA, even if it would allow them to spend billions more taxpayer dollars. Aaaaaaaaand you have congressional Democrats at war with their demigod. "Pass the popcorn," indeed.
But wait, it gets better, as this Democrat civil war rages on within Capitol Hill as well:
The battle has pitted friend against friend, nowhere more so than Pelosi and Representative Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT3), the fiery liberal from New Haven who has girded for this fight for two years. Italian grandmothers who are close friends, Pelosi and DeLauro fought in private during a leadership meeting Wednesday night over the tactics DeLauro and her union allies were deploying to defeat the legislation, according to several senior Democrats.
By Thursday’s votes, the duo held an animated discussion in public on the House floor.
Pelosi has kept her plans close to the vest throughout this process, but those close to her and White House advisers say that she does not want to see Obama’s agenda fall at the hands of Democrats. DeLauro is leading the charge against trade with an approach that some Democrats view as any means necessary.
In other words, Pelosi is an obtusely loyal Obama lieutenant and foot-soldier, and DeLauro is a crazy, wild-eyed communist radical. If you don't see much, if any, daylight between those two designations, join the club, but it's sure as shinola manifesting itself right now.
Forget popcorn, let's have a barbecue.
You can see why TPA is almost certainly doomed. If most Democrats won't vote for TAA, that leaves the bulk of uncommitted Republicans to do so, which would put them in the position of supporting a policy they oppose to bail out their archenemy president. Quite likely a bridge too far.
Were it me, I would vote for TPA and against TAA. If the two were linked.....
Let's just say that in this instance, I'm glad I'm not in the House.
UPDATE: The last redoubt of the cosmic narcissist:
By making a rare, last-ditch visit to Capitol Hill, Barack Obama’s message to House Democrats was clear and simple: The trade deal they’re in danger of voting down is about him. [emphasis added]
<Facepalm> Is that really what he wants to say after lashing imperiled Dems to his policy superstructure last fall, costing them a dozen more House seats and their Senate majority as a result?
The unscheduled lobbying trip to the Hill on Friday morning was Obama’s first in nearly two years....
His renowned imperial aloofness. Maybe if he'd engaged more with his congressional allies over the years, such a belated sortie might have had an impact now.
....and it put his reputation on the line in an unusually personal way.
Something tells me what he thinks his reputation is differs markedly from how everybody else sees it.
He met privately with the entire House Democratic caucus, and made what one lawmaker described as a “powerful presentation.” …
For weeks, Democrats in the House and Senate supporting the legislation, as well as those on the fence looking to get to “yes” out of loyalty to the president, had been begging Obama to identify himself more explicitly with the fast-track authority he needed to finalize the trade pact — make this “Barack Obama’s trade deal,” not just Trade Promotion Authority, they said.
Like he still had "that old," um, "black magic".
Obama only slowly came around, relying on individual and small group appeals behind closed doors, and on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA12) to help line up the votes they’d need to make up for Republican defections.
In other words, most congressional Democrats have finally had enough of being taken so blatantly for granted. Which helps explain why O's appeal fell on deaf ears:
Mr. Obama grounded his message in personal experience, telling lawmakers that his actions were aimed at lifting up American workers. But many Democrats remained opposed to the fast-track bill Friday morning, and some said Mr. Obama’s argument relied on simply trusting him.
“The president said, ‘I know steelworkers in the South Side of Chicago who lost their jobs and everything I do is for them.’ Well, I was born and raised in Detroit and I represent Minneapolis, so I don’t really think his emotional tie to displaced workers is greater than mine or anybody else’s,” said Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN5), co-chair of the House [Communist] Caucus, who plans to oppose both key trade measures Friday. “I really disagree with him on this more and more.”
Yes, it's come to this, ladies and gentlemen: Even Red Barry's fellow pinkos don't trust him and aren't buying his self-centered bullshit.
It sure is a good thing that Barack Obama is president-for-life, because otherwise you could get the powerful impression that he isn't just a lame duck, but a duck without legs altogether.
UPDATE II: Leadership:
Democrats blocked plans for a House vote on sending Barack Obama his fast-track trade bill, handing him an embarrassing defeat on a second-term priority just hours after he made a rare visit to Capitol Hill to seek their support.
In a 126-302 vote Friday, Democrats helped reject a displaced workers’ aid program that they usually support, because the defeat meant the House couldn’t send the fast-track trade bill to Obama even if it passed in a symbolic vote.
TPA itself actually narrowly squeaked by 219-211, but it can't go anywhere without TAA as part of a package deal. If some way was finagled of de-coupling the two, TPA alone could go to House-Senate conference committee, but there's no way that a TAA-less package could survive a Democrat filibuster. And given that it was House Donks who shot down TAA, and it's highly unlikely that majority Republicans would pick up the slack on any re-vote.....
Maybe Barry should have played another eighteen holes instead.
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