So Obama got his fast track authority.
My question is does fast track authority violate the US Constitution?
So, does making it so they only need 50 votes to pass a treaty (via fast track authority) violate the constitution?
Does Fast Track negate the 2/3 vote necessary once the Agreement is submitted to Congress for approval? I thought what it mainly did was allow only an up or down vote (not an opportunity to tweak the agreement and send it back to the president).
I guess my mistake here is this is not a treaty. It is just a trade agreement which has no special requirements.
Sorry about that…carry on.
NAFTA (from wikipedia):
After much consideration and emotional discussion, the House of Representatives passed the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act on November 17, 1993, 234-200. The agreement’s supporters included 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats. The bill passed the Senate on November 20, 1993, 61-38.[6] Senate supporters were 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats. Clinton signed it into law on December 8, 1993; the agreement went into effect on January 1, 1994.[7][8] Clinton, while signing the NAFTA bill, stated that “NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t support this agreement.”
Ok…looking in to it more I am more confused.
Any definition of “treaty” you look up basically says an agreement between two (or more) countries.
So, is it that such things can be whatever the president feels like calling them? “Treaty” inconvenient? No problem, call it an “agreement” and voila…problem solved.
I am an idiot, so for what it’s worth:
Is it possible the Trans-Pacific Partnership is simply the lesser of two evils? That it is heading off a similar, and possibly exclusive, agreement with another world power (China? Russia? some other aspiring gold-hoarding oil-nation looking to transition away from petroleum?)? Hence the secrecy and haste?
Could it be designed to kill a situation that would severely harm our ability to access that market?
There is no unusual secrecy or haste here.
It is harder to negotiate an agreement with other world powers when the negotiations are public. You keep draft proposals private until you have an agreement, then you present that proposal for ratification at home. If Congress doesn’t like the text of it once revealed, it will vote it down. I don’t find anything particularly nefarious about that. There’s nothing inherently anti-democratic about, or any moreso than lots of things we ask our democratically-elected representatives to do privately on our behalf.
But you’re right that the TPP is designed to avoid a worse agreement–namely, one that China negotiates with the rest of the Pacific Rim with less U.S. input.
That I understand, but I’ve got a question about this:
ISTM that there’s no reason for the U.S. to not make its initial positions public on the matters it wants the ultimate agreement to address. Sure, after that, you keep any subsequent drafts under wraps until the deal is done. But I don’t see why the initial ask can’t be public - it includes the positions that purportedly represent where we stand as a nation.
Can you clarify?
(ISTM that there should be a healthy debate over those positions before we even go into the negotiations, even if the only thing to come out of the debate is better understanding on the part of the Administration of domestic political attitudes towards them, precisely because those positions are our positions as a nation, as a democracy. But that’s another argument for another day, not to mention me being my usual small-d democrat self.)
I’m no expert on this stuff, but ISTM that there are costs to mere proposals, for both the country making the proposal and the one considering it (and potentially rejecting it). These come in many forms–from the attention brought by even proposing some change, to the backlash for some items that are meant for bargaining purposes only to be negotiated away, to the public admission that we’re willing to bargain away certain things if we get the right price.
This takes many different forms. We might be more reluctant to propose some measure we know we’re using only as a bargaining chip if merely proposing it will hurt politically, for example. As another example, if we propose that China takes some human rights measure, that’s not just some negotiating position. A public pronouncement by the US like that has diplomatic consequences. There’s no sense racking up all of the consequences for all these different proposals when most of them will end up on the cutting room floor.
I think they probably won’t admit this, but I imagine part of the rationale is to try to prevent special interest lobbying as well. If you announce a proposal and then X, Y, and Z industries know they are likely to get harmed they will spend all of their political capital trying to get a different result. That will happen at the up-or-down vote stage, but the political dynamics and public choice theory of an approval vote are quite different from how industries are able to exercise power at the proposing/negotiating stage. Of course, some people fear that the opposite is happening, and that secrecy allows the industries to get their say but not interest groups with public interests in mind. Maybe. I think the proof will probably be in the pudding.
Bullshit. It’s now set up where they can’t change it. It’s either a full upvote or a full downvote. Which means that, if it has more good than bad in it, it will pass. Even though we’ve already been told about about a bunch of really bad stuff in it.
And if it was just business as usual, they would not have needed to pass a law to “fast track” it so that the bad parts can’t be voted down. There’s no reason to do this except because you expect there to be things that would be voted down in the proposal.
I had no problem with secret negotiations as long as Congress wasn’t neutered. But they are. So Obama can offer things that he knows that we the people would be against, as long as they don’t outnumber the stuff that they will be okay with.
I don’t know how bad it will be, but there will be stuff that would not have otherwise gotten through Congress. I’m already braced for a rehash over SOPA and PIPA, which couldn’t pass otherwise. I’m not sure the Internet will have the power to stop it this time.
I also would not be remotely surprised if there’s stuff in there about breaking encryption. They can even justify it as a way to stop encrypted copyright violations. But this is horrible for everyone. Encryption that can be broken by the feds can be broken by anyone. That’s why it cannot pass Congress.
There’s just so much bad stuff going on, and we have no assurances from our President that this stuff is off the table. We do know that those Democrats who have seen parts of the bill are against it, which says a lot.
The TPP is just to obvious a way to throw on riders that Congress will have to approve. We already saw Democrats capitulate on fast-track authority–something that shouldn’t exist in a democratic nation.
If this were really about free trade, which has pretty much broad popular support, there would be no reason for this underhanded method.
And, yes, our government in the past has been less than democratic. The fight for democracy is ongoing, and always has been. Heck, our biggest problems right now are the same big businesses that are actually allowed to participate in the treaty negotiations. How fucking screwed up is that? Why the fuck are only the pro-business side being represented?
Labor endorsed the President and he’s negotiating it. Does labor not stand by its endorsement? Does labor not trust Barack Obama, or the guy they endorsed a decade ago, John Kerry? If not, they should say so, like right now.
- sigh * This. The country has gone more or less in the direction he said he’d take it, and in the direction we said we wanted it to go (not exactly, but good luck getting any 8 year plan to go according to the letter in the real world). If BO were inclined to have the sort of administration to totally screw Average Joe, he’d have done it more blatantly by now.
This is ridiculous. I voted for Obama (twice) and Kerry, and would have endorsed them in a heartbeat in their respective general elections if my endorsement was worth anything. That doesn’t mean I trust them to do the right thing under every circumstance. That just means I thought it was extremely important that they, rather than their opponents, be President. That I might oppose some of their decisions as President doesn’t contradict that in the least.
Needless to say, I expect the same is true for the labor unions that actually endorsed Obama and Kerry.
Fast track is business as usual. That’s how all of our trade agreements get passed.
You may disagree with the concept, weighing more heavily the values of transparency and congressional involvement in negotiations, but it is false to assert that the use of fast-track authority is proof of undemocratic bamboozlement (unless you feel that way about all of our trade deals since, what, 1974?).
False. A good start would be this simple Wiki page. There are lots of reasons to do it. That doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. But you don’t do justice to the genuine debate between reasonable positions here by caricaturing those who disagree with you.
I think that’s all valid, but what you said was that labor isn’t at the table. Labor’s elected representative is at the table, actually. If Obama could not be trusted to negotiate a fair deal for labor, then they should have endorsed no one.
From what little I have read , this looks like a good deal. In general I think lowering trade barriers is a good thing and this has the additional benefit of strengthening US alliances in the Pacific without permanently shutting out China which may join the deal eventually.
Will this pass Congress though? The vote will be near the primaries and already Sanders, Trump and others are raging against the deal. And some industry groups like pharma and tobacco are unhappy about specific provisions.
Krugman appears to be warmingtowards the deal and I look forward to his detailed analysis.
The deal will get through Congress pretty easily. Republicans have been very cooperative with the President on trade deals.
Possibly more so than the Dems. The fast track vote was 60/37, and 30 of those 37 nays were Dems, plus the independents from VT and ME.
I counted on my fingers there, so +/- a few.
The problem is that they can’t afford attacks from their (further) right for supporting “Obamatrade”.