Trade Promotion Authority Is Baaaaaaaaack

by JASmius



Well.  THAT was a short six weeks:

Barack Obama's trade agenda appears to be back on track after an extraordinary bipartisan rescue operation mounted in the week since it was derailed in the House by rebellious Democrats backed by organized labor.

Working in tandem with the White House, Republican officials arranged for a Thursday vote in the House on a measure to give Obama authority to negotiate global trade deals that Congress can approve or reject, but not change.

Separately, a bill to renew an expiring program of aid for workers who lose their jobs because of imports will move quickly.

"We are committed to ensuring both ... get votes in the House and Senate and are sent to the president for signature," House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a joint statement issued Wednesday in an attempt to reassure pro-trade Democrats whose votes will be needed.

I know Tea Partiers are going to be in conniptions about this, but let's take a dispassionate review of the situation, shall we?

TPA (Trade Promotion Authority, or "fast track") was linked to TAA (Trade Adjustment Assistance) in the Senate because minority Democrats wouldn't support TPA any other way.  It passed the Senate a few weeks ago, 62-37 with 89% Republican support and 33% Democrat support.  Over it went to the House, where anti-trade Democrats used that linkage to shoot down the whole package last week by routing TAA, even though they support and have been demanding it for years.  Over the weekend, The One deputized....Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader McConnell to try and resurrect it.

This is a strategy?  If there aren't the votes to pass TAA, presumably there aren't the votes to decouple it from TPA.  And the hundred-plus Democrats who rebelled last week are going to be persuaded to to vote for said decoupling, putting fast track on the, well, fast track to passage, based on their trust in the two leaders of the enemy party to bring up the same TAA that most, if not all, Republicans oppose and will probably defeat?  In short, House leftwingnuts are going to give up all their leverage for three magic beans?  And if it were to somehow pass, both would have to go back to the Senate, where the linkage was made in the first place.

I don't get it.

Nevertheless, Boehner found a way, at least for the first step:

Barack Obama's trade agenda appears to be back on track after an extraordinary bipartisan rescue operation mounted in the week since it was derailed in the House by rebellious Democrats backed by organized labor.

Working in tandem with the White House, Republican officials arranged for a Thursday vote in the House on a measure to give Obama authority to negotiate global trade deals that Congress can approve or reject, but not change.

Separately, a bill to renew an expiring program of aid for workers who lose their jobs because of imports will move quickly.

"We are committed to ensuring both ... get votes in the House and Senate and are sent to the president for signature," House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a joint statement issued Wednesday in an attempt to reassure pro-trade Democrats whose votes will be needed.

Now we'll see if Senate Democrats can mount and sustain a filibuster, for which they would only need four more votes. or whether they can actually be suckered by their own demigod as well.

To sum up for the scoreboard, on the TPA/TAA/TPP, Barack Obama is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons ("immigration and environmentalist leftwing ideas, etc."), and Tea Party opposition represents doing the wrong thing (opposing free trade) for the right reasons.

Again, it all comes down to whether you think Barack Obama is leaving in a year and a half, or whether you think he's in the White House for good.  If the latter, then we should oppose TPA; if the former, especially if Scott Walker succeeds him, we should support it.

How strange it is that I am now the optimist in this intra-party equation.