Heads Up!! "Obama Ready to Defy Base in Order to Advance Trans-Pacific Partnership"

[pampango]

201. So the authority of a president to 'secretly' negotiate trade agreements started under FDR then

was expanded later. Fine. Does that then mean that republicans were a little bit right in 1936 to accuse FDR in the presidential campaign that year of "secretly has made tariff agreements with our foreign competitors, flooding our markets with foreign commodities" - by extension 'shipping American jobs overseas'? And that those who make a similar against Obama are even more right.

International negotiations are almost always done 'secretly'. (Witness the current negotiations with Iran.) If final agreement is reached (proving to be quite difficult in the case of the Iranian talks), the treaty is submitted to each nation for ratification - in our case it goes to congress for approval or rejection. If each country then made changes to the treaty, each 'new' treaty would have to be resubmitted to each country for its changes to our changes, then our changes to their changes, and so on. That would result in a world with few, if any, international agreements. That does not sound like a path to solving global problems through peaceful negotiations.

If each country's legislature is going to 'renegotiate' every proposed agreement, perhaps we should just have parliaments do the negotiating in the first place. Of course, that was what the RTAA was designed to avoid.

When republicans rejected US membership in the League of Nations after WWI they did not get to renegotiate the terms of our membership, they just rejected it. When the republican senate the idea of an FDR's International Trade Organization, they did not get to renegotiate its terms, it just died. Name me a negotiated international agreement that our congress had the full power to 'renegotiate' domestically that eventually became a recognized international treaty.

This is all kind of academic in the sense that Obama is not going to get 'fast track' authority. Tea party republicans don't trust him. Liberals in congress don't trust him. (The only people who seem to trust him are the "perhaps uniformed", "yeah, for our team" liberal base. Conservatives - by 85% - don't want Obama to have that authority.) From a republican point of view why should they give 'fast track' authority to Obama? Without it, republicans who control congress will be able make any changes they want to the TPP. Pesky provisions on labor rights and the environment (if they are in there) - GONE. Some multinational wants higher tariffs on a foreign competitor, hard for a republican to say not to that.

Obama is not going to get fast track authority and he would be a fool to submit the TPP to a republican congress without it.