TPP: 13 Democratic Senators Invite Republicans to Make Them Laughing Stocks and More Serious Matters

[marmar]

By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and New Economic Perspectives. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives


The cloture vote in the Senate is now done, making the TPA vote itself a mere formality. The vote was 60 – 37 in favor of cloture with 13 of the 14 original Democratic defectors (Ben Cardin was the exception) sticking with the multinational corporations, the President, and all but five of the Republicans in supporting cloture. Supporters of cloture celebrated the bipartisan nature of the vote, as if Americans who lose their jobs and their sovereignty as a consequence of it, and the things it enables, will look more favorably on what they did because both major parties did it.

Meanwhile, three of the five steps in the process for passing the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill devised by the Republicans are virtually complete. The remaining steps now defined by McConnell are:

After the Senate votes Wednesday on final passage for fast-track, it will take a procedural vote on a package that includes TAA and trade preferences for African countries known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

McConnell has promised both bills, as well as a customs and enforcement bill favored by Democrats, will reach Obama’s desk by the end of the week.

“If we all keep working together and trusting each other, then by the end of the week the President will have TPA, TAA and AGOA and Preferences on his desk — with Customs in the process of heading his way too,”

he said on the floor.

This remaining process includes the final step of the House passing TAA with the overwhelming support of Democrats, added to about 30 – 40 Republicans, because, it is assumed, probably correctly, that once TPA is passed, then Democrats will have every incentive to vote for TAA, while Boehner will be able to supply the remainder of the votes needed to pass it and keep the McConnell/Boehner commitments to the House and Senate Democratic defectors.

This last step, however, isn’t guaranteed to happen in the House. A TAA package received 86 Republican votes in the House in the failed roll call vote that was tied to the first TPA package. But that total for TAA was delivered under pressure from the leadership to pass the TPA package. .......................(more)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/tpp-13-democratic-senators-invite-republicans-to-make-them-laughing-stocks-and-more-serious-matters.html

[Jefferson23]

1. +1. Spot on:

Playing this game of hypotheticals has been attacked by TPP proponents as engaging in fantasy. But what is the rule in the TPP agreement that would exclude any impact we can think of from the purview of these private courts?

Until we have such a rule that can make clear the limits of the constraints on US sovereignty inherent in the TPP and a procedure for adjudicating these limits that is independent of the discretion of the private courts themselves, we would not even know what the limits of the policy constraints being imposed on the US by the TPP are. And until we do know what these limits are, we cannot say for sure that there are any substance objections of the TPP, from adjustments to negative job impacts to adjustments to climate change impacts and everything in between, that won’t fit into the general objection of constraints on sovereignty and government policy space. And that’s why I think the sovereignty issue should be the overarching theme that unites us all in opposition to the TPP.