Obamatrade in the Shadows

Proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership are already laying the groundwork necessary to implement the controversial trade agreement during President Obama’s lame duck session.

The move appears to be the result of cowardly, pro-TPP Republicans who presumably don’t wish to lose their seats over their support for the trade agreement.

“We’re working with congressional leaders and with the leaders of the Finance Committee and the Ways & Means Committee to chart that pathway forward — laying the groundwork, doing the preparatory work, drafting the bills, drafting the reports that need to get done so that when that window of opportunity opens, we’ll be ready to walk through it,” U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said on Monday.

Froman made his comments to the Council on Foreign Relations, a controversial think tank which advocates heavily for globalization, multinational trading blocs, and the creation of supranational governments.

Froman is the first government official to acknowledge that the Obama administration is already working on implementing the bill. The Trade Promotion Authority fast-track law — which was renewed last year — stipulates a number of conditions before the draft of a TPP-implementation bill can be submitted to Congress.

The president must submit a copy of the final text of the TPP to Congress, as well as a plan for actually implementing and enforcing the trade agreement. These must be submitted 30 days before an actual TPP-implementation bill can be sent to Congress.

In order to “do this in the lame duck [session], you want to do as much of the preparatory work as possible under Trade Promotion Authority beforehand, and that’s what we’re working on now,” Froman explained.

Rep. Paul Ryan wrote the Trade Promotion Authority law, which he claimed “gives us the ability to go negotiate trade agreements and then gives Congress the final say-so on whether or not we enter into a trade agreement.”

Critics, however, argue that the deal inherently puts American sovereignty and jobs at risk. And despite Ryan and other Republicans’ insistence that the TPP is a purely economic entity, Obama is — to his credit — more honest about the globalist implications of such deals.

“This is not just about jobs and trade — it’s not just about hard cold cash,” he said. “It’s also about building relationships across borders. When your companies come together you help bring countries and cultures together,” he told a group of foreign investors on Monday.

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But waiting for Obama’s lame duck session to push through TPP is not the result of some nefarious attempt by Democrats to prevent the TPP from becoming an election issue. Rather it appears to be the result of cowardly, pro-TPP Republicans who presumably don’t wish to lose their seats over their support for the trade agreement.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “made clear publicly that he doesn’t want to see a vote before the election, so that really means, from the Senate perspective anyway, in the lame-duck period,” Froman said.

Indeed, the one thing that has been holding up the TPP isn’t Republican concern about the agreement’s potential effects on U.S. sovereignty or jobs, but Republican concern that the profits of their sugar daddies in the pharmaceutical industry might take a hit.

According to Froman, concerns about market exclusivity for biologics is the “main outstanding issue right now” holding up passage of the TPP.