Will Democrats and Tea Partiers Derail Obama's Secret Trade Deal?
I say the chance is nil Tea Party crowd will fall in line.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/fast-track-authority-obama-trans-pacific-partnership
But this week, about 151 House Democrats and 23 Republicans—many of them tea partiers—wrote letters to the administration saying this time they are unwilling to give the president carte blanche to "diplomatically legislate." If a couple dozen more lawmakers join the unlikely group of Dems and GOPers, the House could have enough votes to shoot down fast-track and derail the TPP. If Obama doesn't get the special trade powers, Congress will likely try to make some changes to the final pact, which could cause other countries to drop out of the deal.
In a letter sent Wednesday, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and about 150 of her colleagues said there has been too much secrecy surrounding the contents of this deal. They say they still don't know what the TPP contains when it comes to things like food security, financial reform, and labor protections. The US trade representative consults with members of Congress if they have questions about the deal, but unless lawmakers read the text of the final agreement, they will not know exactly how the TPP affects domestic policy. "We are not just here to rubber stamp what gets done" by trade negotiators, DeLauro told reporters last month.
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Many conservative Republicans—usually fans of free trade—feel the same way. "For two hundred years of our nation's history, Congress led our nation's trade policy," Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and 22 Republicans in the House wrote in a letter sent to the president Tuesday. "However, recent presidents have seized Congress' constitutional trade authority and also 'diplomatically legislated'…using…'Fast Track.'"
"Conservatives have shown themselves to instinctively oppose anything coming out of the Obama White House. So their opposition is not surprising," Adam Hersh, a trade expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, says in an email. But he adds that the Democratic opposition is new. "We're seeing the culmination of dissatisfaction with persistent poor trading outcomes for the US economy" such as job outsourcing, he says, and the feeling that Congress has been "kept in the dark."
