You may have heard that the U.S. Senate passed a bill last night that gives the president fast-track (or trade promotion) authority on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. I wouldn’t assume, however, that this was a solid step forward towards eventual passage of the treaty. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who is serving in the Senate under indictment for corruption, successfully added an amendment to the bill that would bar Malyasia from being a party to the treaty because of their record on using slave labor. The whole story on the amendment and its likely effect is a lot more complicated, but the simple way of understanding it is that it throws a big obstacle into the path to final passage of the bill.
If the human trafficking language isn’t stripped or modified substantially, it will put the administration in the position of choosing between accepting defeat or disingenuously re-designating Malaysia as a less serious human rights offender. In other words, this language, if it remains, has just massively upped the political and moral cost of signing the TPP bill.
There were several other attempts to poison the bill that failed, including one by Republican Senator Jeff Flake that reportedly would have stripped funding to provide “job training and financial aid to workers who lose their jobs to international trade.” Obviously, if that had passed it would have killed off the already quite limited Democratic support for the treaty.
The House Republican leadership says that they need more Democratic votes if they are going to pass a version of the TPP, and they’re cajoling the president to do more to round them up. They’re also thinking of adding some kind of immigration poison pill amendment to try to round up more of their own votes. If the House poisons the bill will anti-immigrant language, that, too, will have to be stripped.
Perhaps these headaches can be ironed out in the Conference Committee between the House and Senate, assuming that the House can pass some version of the TPP, but if you are an odds-maker, you’re probably thinking that the TPP is less likely to become law than it was before the Senate acted last night.
I’m okay with that. Are you?
