We’ll never know for sure if Nancy Smash had the president’s blessing, but I wouldn’t be in the slightest surprised if she did.
“In a remarkable rejection of a president they have resolutely backed, House Democrats voted to kill assistance to workers displaced by global trade, a program their party created and has stood by for four decades. By doing so, they brought down legislation granting the president trade promotion authority — the power to negotiate trade deals that cannot be amended or filibustered by Congress — before it could even come to a final vote.”
I suppose extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I unfortunately have no evidence so support my claim. All I can say is that when I’ve said what little I have had to say about this matter, I’ve been consistent in expressing my doubt that the administration sincerely thought they could pass this bill, or even truly wanted to.
I don’t think it’s possible for an American administration to turn its back on free trade as the organizing principle of our foreign policy. We’ve been preaching this to foreign countries since the end of World War Two and we can’t very well say “Never mind” to the whole Pacific Rim. Even hypocrisy has its limits when shame is involved.
So, if this was going to go down, it had to be Congress that did it. And it had to be done in a way that blame could be deflected as strongly as possible away from the president and the administration. No hint that they’ve been acting in bad faith can be allowed.
This isn’t because of domestic politics. It’s because we still want foreign countries to listen to us when we talk. I can’t even imagine an American administration that would have walked away from the TPP talks by saying, “We’re not interested in making free trade agreements with you.”
That was never an option.
Maybe I’m wrong and this really has been exactly what it seems. All I’m saying is that this is what I said would happen. It happened before with Simpson-Bowles, and that didn’t surprise me in the slightest either.
In any case, just consider the possibility that maybe I have been right all along.
Not the simplest explanation based on the evidence. Whatever the reason, it’s been clear since the beginning of its administration that Barack Obama is stupid when it comes to economic matters. Why this secret trade deal would be any better is hardly clear. It seems Democrats in Congress have learned not to trust the President on economic matters. I think they’re right and I hope they persist in defeating this trade deal.
Of course, maybe we could negotiate a free trade agreement a little more out in the open, with significant input from labor and environmental groups. It might yield a more comprehensive agreement taking into account the interests of more than just the manufacturers and big money boys. It could offer protections for workers and localities. It would have a procedure for filing complaints about unfair labor practices and wanton pollution of air, land and water. It might even have a funding mechanism for enforcement so that a manufacturer in, say, the United States would have assurances that it’s operating on a fairly level playing field with one in Vietnam or China.
Naaaaaah. Better to just dick around with 12 dimensional chess games for several years while wealth inequality goes from chasm to yawning abyss, then shrug and say “Oh well; we tried. Sort of.” Wink!
If President Obama really wanted to kill the TPP all he would have to do is insist that it be made public and opened for debate as all democratically passed laws should be. Then let politics do the rest.
I don’t think there’s any way Obama deliberately nixed it. The fact is NAFTA left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth but free trade, if done well, has much bigger upsides than downsides. Most any economist will say that. There are displacements which is why today’s bill was so important. Without that, there’s no way the rest of it passes (nor should it).
I think Obama’s very smart and would have cut a good deal. I still think there’s a chance this gets turned around but this poison pill would have to pass with more Republican support. Otherwise, there won’t be enough Democrats to pass the ultimate legislation.
I have yet to see much evidence that mitigation for displacements consistently gets people jobs. I’d be more likely to support Free Trade if we did straight up wealth transfers from the profits to the displaced.
I don’t entirely disagree. If a 50 year old worker loses a good union job, it’s going to be all but impossible to retrain him as a successful computer programmer or even an x-ray tech. There is real pain as a result of these trade deals. Still, I think the best evidence shows that the benefits far outweigh the losses so, overall, more people (in all countries) prosper.
The pain of dislocation is horrible. Entire towns are giant monuments to the suffering. My daughter is living in Syracuse. Great example of a rust belt town that’s struggled to claw its way back with very limited success. The entire vibe there is sad. So I’m sympathetic to those who say free trade is bad and should be killed. But the other side of the coin are towns like Seattle and San Francisco that are booming with high tech startups. Winners and losers.
So yes, assuming it could be done in a way that makes sense, it would be best if people received direct transfers of wealth rather than retraining. If we had social policies like Denmark, Sweden or Norway, displaced workers would be supported in meaningful ways. I favor this as well as raising taxes on corporations. Germany has proven it’s possible to have a vibrant economy together with a meaningful social safety net.
Do you think Pelosi was in on it? I’m serious, not snarking. She obviously was playing at least 3-dimentional chess.
Do you think the president was angling to get a better deal from his negotiating partners? Maybe saying, “Hey, you saw how hard I tried. We have to do a better deal or I won’t be able to get it ratified.”
It is striking that Pelosi walked with Obama as they entered this morning’s Dem caucus meeting, and a few hours later she took to the floor to announce why she would be voting down the legislation the President claimed he desperately wanted passed.
Clyburn was right up there walking with the POTUS and Minority Leader this morning as well; he also voted the Bills down.
God Damn, the Speaker and his leadership team are all spectacularly bad at their jobs. They brought a crucial vote to the floor, spoke out in support for it, and lost by 176 votes. Normally this would be totally humiliating, but they and their Caucus don’t seem to mind. Today’s GOP Congressional Caucus doesn’t want to govern.
I think what you see is what you get. Pelosi and her team were working for Obama despite misgivings. When it was clear the bill was going to flame out, she and her team switched to stay with her caucus. You can’t lead from a splinter faction.
This requires us to accept that Nancy and the rest of her leadership team didn’t know the Bill was going to flame out before they walked into the room with the President yesterday morning, a few hours before the vote. Pelosi’s team is great at vote-counting, and very good at keeping their caucus together on votes they care about.
It’s possible. It’s more probable that they didn’t care about the vote as much as it was suspected they did.
The most important thing to remember is that it the Speaker’s job to line up the votes to pass something that he brings to the floor. It’s NOT the job of the Minority Leader to line up the votes.
with Obama and your commentary led me to believe your earlier comments on the subject. Because of that I’m not particularly surprised by this result either.
gloating really doesn’t become you boo.
anyone who’s been paying attention knew, for a very long time, that this was doomed from the onset. the bill, as written, is a recipe for disaster. when nancy p turns against you you’ve really overreached.
good riddance to bad legislation and misplaced priorities
Reading the comment trail to BooMan’s previous post this morning, you can see that people were claiming explicit knowledge that Pelosi was not just a fast-track authority supporter; there were claims she was whipping votes for it. So I think Boo is pretty justified in pointing out that the assumptions of many of our fellow progressives are worth questioning.
With that willingness to suspend my disbelief, if the President’s statements are part of an elaborate kabuki, I still believe they’re exhaustingly distasteful and they still do damage to the progressive movement.
The way you put it helps me explain better what I mean.
It certainly SEEMED doomed from the outset, in that the politics for this smells to high heaven. It goes absolutely counter to the present political climate in this country. That’s why I don’t think the pressure was coming principally from within this country. It comes from forces that have little concern for, or knowledge of, American politics, because they are outside of it.
They’re used to getting their way, and we see the usual American whores pushing it. But nobody else here wants it. Obama, whether he was sincere or not, had to go along or seem to go along. Certainly he knows the politics stinks for him. But he also understands the separation of powers . . .
Unfortunately, it’s a little too soon to celebrate, I’m not sure this is over yet.
not nearly over yet. It’s still easy to see some kind of deal
I know what I am arguing is a little out there, but I start from a pretty sane position, which is that [Bretton Woods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference%5D is the kind of Ur-Language of American postwar foreign policy, especially with our allies.
Sure, we have a somewhat noisy left and labor movement that never signed on for this, but basically the whole postwar consensus in Washington was based around the principles laid out at Bretton Woods.
Among them:
A lot of the initial stuff was about regulating currency and currency exchanges, and also just financing reconstruction of Europe and Japan. But it was also about opening up markets and having rules that people would abide by instead of having economic policy be war by other means.
It became our mantra and our answer to communism and managed economies and tariffs and barriers to trade. We battered the weak with this message and cajoled the strong.
It’s as American as apple pie, and even if we don’t want a free trade agreement with 18 Asian nations right now, we’re not about to argue against the principles we’ve preached for seventy years.
TPP had to go forward for so many reasons, but primarily because a refusal to engage in the process would signal a complete turnaround that would not be understood by our allies at all. However, just because we had to treat this with the utmost seriousness, we didn’t have to think it was good politically for the Democratic Party. We didn’t have to actually want any deal we could easily get to become the actual deal.
I don’t doubt that the administration has fought to make this deal as good as they can get, but there’s no political upside to passing it. And it probably isn’t good enough as it stands to really fight for.
I think this is what a dive looks like.
They took a dive.
But that doesn’t mean that they won’t try to use the dive to go back to the negotiating table. Administrations come and go, but these basic principles remain largely the same. For Obama, this isn’t something that is really in his interest to pass, especially in a form in which it actually can pass.
So, there isn’t much choice but to fight for the deal. But winning wouldn’t be winning, so this is what we get.
Just to conclude my thoughts here, just try to imagine what Obama would have to do and say if he concluded that these types of trade deals are just bad policy and the American establishment isn’t for them anymore.
The backlash would be so brutal from the elite media, from the elite donors, for the elite senators, and from the global pro-American elite, that it’s unthinkable that he’s spend that kind of political capital.
So, once you realize that you have to negotiate the treaty, and you realize that you can’t be seen as unenthusiastic about it, your options become both quite limited and actually quite clear.
fascinating
Exactly. Very well explained.
I suspect you’re right, and I have kind of felt that way too for a while.
But when you say “Even hypocrisy has its limits when shame is involved”, etc., I don’t know if that’s right. This is not really about hypocrisy, because it’s not really about ideology, it’s about extremely powerful economic pressure from global financial forces which at this point are at least as much foreign as domestic.
Normal politics would not work against that kind of combination.
It’s not about trade. Trade is when I give you something and you give me something in return. Trade is balanced. If I saw a trade agreement that guaranteed balance, at least over say a four year cycle, then I’d be inclined to support it. I like it that we have the choice of buying Volkswagen, Mercedes’, Hyundais and Toyotas without protectionist tariffs that give an oligopoly to GM and Ford. But something’s wrong when the PC was invented here and the hard drive was invented here but now ALL manufacturing AND engineering of motherboards and hard drives is done in Asia. We denounce the fact that American kids are not enrolling in Engineering courses. But what career path can they look forward to? Emigrating to Asia? Some do. A Chinese Lady friend tells me that many Americans work in Shanghai. They marry Chinese women. It didn’t sound so bad until she told me about them learning the Mao song that is sung on some holiday. Is that our destiny? To disappear in the sands of time?
How about the copyright and “intellectual property” (Can one own a thought?) parts of TPP. Parts of the TPP so smelly they were to be forever hidden and just brought out in the secret corporate tribunals (star chambers?).
Why should national origins of goods be hidden as matter of law? So we can’t avoid the melamine in the baby food? So the Japanese can’t buy Japanese as they prefer? I don’t want the Japanese to be forced to buy our goods. I just want them to have the opportunity to buy them at a fair price. I have no problem with buying Japanese goods at the same price (in dollars) that they are offered in Japan. I do object to Japan engaging in dumping and predatory pricing to destroy American manufacturers so that their keiretsus can have a cartel.
All the arguments for TPP have bogus premises. Obama is smart. He must know that. I have to conclude that he is a corporate shill.
Trade, Yes. Economic colonization by one way “trade”, No!
Your post blows Boo Man’s thesis out of the water. It is not necessary for a president to back a TPP-style corporation protection treaty in order to maintain credibility on legitimate free trade issues.
Yeah, unfortunately, you’re probably wrong about that.
Part of the problem is you’ve just defined the TPP as a particular style of free trade agreement when it would be more appropriate to understand it as a generic product of multinational business negotiations.
Basically, there are free trade agreements and then there are mutual defense treaties, but there aren’t so much styles of either. They exist or they don’t.
Yes, there are always details and the details could be better or worse, but the basic framework isn’t going to change much.
You want to tear down tariffs and have a system for consultation, arbitration, and legal recourse. You want some mitigating features that can soften the blow of economic changes in things like currency evaluations and interest rates. You don’t want to create a complete race to the bottom in wages. There are certain aspirational aspects that will be laid out as principles rather than rules, for example on the use of slave labor. There are some environmental components, particularly now that we need to worry about climate change.
Then each nation will have features unique to themselves and their particular circumstances. Some may be addressed in the agreement but others will not. The funds to help people who lose jobs to outsourcing will come from the U.S. Congress, or not, but won’t be part of the agreement.
What you call “legitimate” free trade issues are basically all the things that are negotiated like this or taken up by national legislatures as adjuncts to the agreement.
Maybe you’re referring to some things you see as unnecessary, like the way copyright protections are handled. But this is just one interest group among many, fighting for the best deal it can get for itself. What it gets, ultimately, is what the nations agree it should get. If the thing is larded up with too much of this stuff and other interest groups are either shut out or lose out, then you can talk about the deal being bad or a bad deal in certain respects. But these are all legitimate free trade issues.
You either believe that this kind of negotiation leads to peace by undermining the incentives for economic warfare, or you don’t.
If you think it’s all just a corporate giveaway, you don’t believe in the American Way as it has existed since the postwar negotiations began.
For a president to walk away from that Way, however, would be to abandon our global leadership as it has been expressed and evangelized for decades. It would be a monumental shift.
And it would signal that we no longer believe that we diagnosed the causes of the world wars correctly, or that times have changed so much that we don’t need to worry about economic war anymore.
This could be correct, but it would be the equivalent of saying that we no longer support the United Nations as a vital way of maintaining peace between nations.
I don’t believe that the “invisible hand” of negotiation automatically leads to some objectively optimal trade agreement. I can imagine good trade agreements. And I can imagine bad ones.
While I agree with your basic premise that the President can’t walk away from Free Trade as a concept, I see no reason why he would want to. You are suggesting that the President didn’t like this deal and secretly wanted it torpedoed. Again, I agree that if Obama wanted the deal sunk, he would need Congress to do it, but I see no reason to believe that he would want this deal sunk.
All the major objections to the deal are not factors that are baked into any trade agreement process:
None of the above problems are inherent to a trade agreement. If Obama didn’t like TPP, he could have negotiated a better deal. If the deal was too corporate-friendly, Obama was not obligated to keep the lobbyists fully in the loop. Nor was he obligated to omit labor and environmental stakeholders out of the loop. I have zero reason to believe that the WH wasn’t basically satisfied with the trade agreement, as well as the additional agreements that would be subject to TPA’s Fast Track authority.
I considered it but I prefer to go with the easiest explanation. Obama is a big legacy guy. You think he wants newspapers plastered with headlines of huge political defeat?
It’s head-shake worthy when you consider the kinds of things he’s willing to spend political capital on. There’s the worsening Iraq situation that we seem to be sliding back into, the Yemen mess which is curiously under-reported, and his apathy towards civil liberties. Obama has been on the wrong side of quite a few things recently and its lowered my regard for his political intelligence.
We’ll see next week, wont we.
I have remarked how contrary issues like this one seem to have unfortunate accidents despite the President’s strong support and arm-twisting.
This one is still in a zombie state with too many Congressional Democrats supporting it and too few Congressional Republicans opposing it.
“This one is still in a zombie state with too many Congressional Democrats supporting it and too few Congressional Republicans opposing it.”
I am amusing myself right now in wondering what combination of arm-twisting and Bill changes could pick up 88 additional votes in less than 72 hours. I also wonder how many of those votes will be delivered from each side of the aisle.
Can you imagine how much more horrible the Speaker would have to make the Bill in order to get that many votes from his side? And how many of today’s 40 Dem YES votes would be lost in response to those changes?
Can the Bill be made so bad that the President would veto it? OK, now I’m getting with the program. This is very funny.
It’s easier to laugh when you’re winning.
I’ll still be making my Congressional calls Monday morning, though.
Too smart by half, Mr. Obama.
We need a president who is not caught up in his…or her…own web of deceits.
Will we get one?
Doubtful.
So it goes.