Promoters of
fast-track executive authority have relied on semantic obfuscation in an effort
to deny the obvious: the President’s top priority is obtaining fast-track
authority because he knows it will expand his powers and allow him to cement his
legacy through the formation of a new political and economic union. If, as
promoters amazingly suggest, the President had more powers without fast-track,
he would veto it. The authority granted in “Trade Promotion Authority” is
authority transferred from Congress to the Executive and, ultimately, to
international bureaucrats.
The entire
purpose of fast-track is for Congress to surrender its power to the Executive
for six years. Legislative concessions include: control
over the content of legislation, the power to fully consider that legislation on
the floor, the power to keep debate open until Senate cloture is invoked, and
the constitutional requirement that treaties receive a two-thirds vote.
Legislation cannot even be amended.
By
contrast, without fast-track, Congress retains all of its legislative
powers, individual members retain all of their procedural tools, and
every single line, jot, and tittle of trade text is publicly available before
any congressional action is taken.
Another
obfuscation is the suggestion that TPP doesn’t yet exist. To the contrary, it
has been under negotiation for six years and lawmakers can enter a closed-door,
walled-off chamber to review it. A vote for fast-track is a vote to authorize
the President to ink the secret deal contained in these pages—to affix his name
on the Union and to therefore enter the United States into
it.
Nucor
Steel Chairman Emeritus, Daniel DiMicco, warned: “The so-called negotiating objectives in the fast-track bill
are merely for show… The President can and does sign the agreement before
Congress views or votes on it.” Fast-track is
the action that empowers the President to put America’s name on the deal sitting
in that walled-off room—before a page of it has been shared with the
public.
In
a Ways and Means document on the new Pacific Union being formed by Obama, the
Committee hints at some of this union’s powers: “if a proposed
change to a trade agreement is contemplated [by the TPP Commission] that would
require a change in U.S. law, all of TPA’s congressional notification,
consultation, and transparency requirements would apply.” In other words, Ways
and Means is intimating that this new secret Pacific Union would function like a
third house of Congress, with legislative primacy, sending changes to the House
and Senate under fast-track procedures (receiving less legislative procedure
than, for instance, Post Office reform). Moreover, this legislative fast-track,
Ways and Means implies, is limited to that which requires a “change in U.S.
law”—meaning if this President (or the next) argues it is simply an executive
action, not a legal action, the Executive could have a free hand to
implement the Commission’s decrees without Congress. This is not merely a
loophole; this is purposeful delegation of congressional authority to the
Executive and to an international body. The fast-tracked implementing
legislation would have the ability to make these delegations binding as a matter
of law.
Amendments to
specify that Congress retains exclusive legislative authority, and to actively
prohibit foreign worker increases, were blocked by fast-track
backers.
Fast-track
supporters have tried to temper concerns about the formation of this
transnational union,
and the subsequent Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and
Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) that would also be pre-approved through
fast-track, by adding additional
“negotiating objectives” via a separate customs bill. The negotiating objectives
are not binding, are not meaningfully enforceable, and no individual lawmaker
can strike any provision which violates them. Fast-track keeps what
congressional authority is left in the hands of the revenues and Rules
committees.
Under the Ways
and Means “solution,” TPP, TTIP, and TiSA could establish broad goals for labor
mobility (allowing Ways and Means to say the negotiating objectives about
“requiring” or “obligating” certain changes has not been violated) and the
President would then implement those changes through executive action, or change
our laws through fast-track.
Negotiating
objectives are, by design, not explicit or realistically enforceable. They
include such bromides as saying it must be the goal of the White House
“to
ensure that trade agreements reflect and facilitate the increasingly
interrelated, multi-sectoral nature of trade and investment activity,” and “to
recognize the growing significance of the Internet as a trading platform in
international commerce.”
It
stretches the outer bounds of logic to contend that a President who happily
disregards the Constitution will be bound to obey a series of broad “negotiating
objectives”—especially when those objectives come with a promised surrender of
congressional power.
Finally,
it must be observed that this is not a “free trade” deal. It is, as Daniel
DiMicco explained, a “unilateral trade disarmament” and “the enablement of
foreign mercantilism,” whereby we open our markets to new foreign imports and
they keep their non-tariff barriers that close their markets to ours. President
Obama refuses to answer questions about the impact on unemployment, wage
stagnation, and trade deficits. He refuses because the answer is all three will
get worse. For instance, a study published in the Wall Street Journal
showed that—due to barriers to U.S. auto exports—the deal would increase foreign
transportation imports over our exports by nearly
four-fold.
Americans
have seen their sovereignty, economic position, and political power erode. They
have seen that power transferred to an elite set who dream of writing rules in
foreign capitals, unburdened by the concerns of the ordinary
citizen.
To
read the trade agreement is to know that, if Congress adopts the fast-track, it
will have preapproved a vast delegation of sovereign authority to an
international union, with growing powers over the lives of ordinary
Americans.
Like
the Gang of Eight, like Obamacare, and so much else—the goal is to get it
approved before the American people know what’s in it.
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