Pelosi Knifes Obama :House Democrats Sabotage the President’s Trade Agenda.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosi-knifes-obama-1434150984
House Democrats pulled off a mutiny against President Obama on Friday and absconded with his trade bill as a hostage. Republicans will launch a rescue mission next week, but this astonishing fiasco could inflict lasting economic and strategic harm on the U.S.
Mr. Obama began the day by paying a rare, unannounced visit to Capitol Hill for an emergency closed-door pep rally with House Democrats, which was in retrospect a bad omen. His talk was reportedly well received at first but then he advised the caucus that “a vote against trade is a vote against me,” while Democrat Peter DeFazio of Oregon noted that the President “tried to guilt people and impugn their integrity.” In other words, it was a vintage Obama performance.
***
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had until Friday promised the White House she’d remain neutral. But after the meeting she took to the floor to deliver a rambling speech that sounded off-the-cuff and encouraged Democrats to vote against a program called Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA. To understand how remarkable this surprise attack was, imagine Pearl Harbor as an inside job.
TAA provides generous income transfers (for up to 130 weeks) and retraining to workers whose jobs are allegedly displaced by trade. In practice it is little more than a giveaway to unions, but expanding TAA has been the usual Democratic price for some votes for fast-track trade authority.
The Senate has already passed fast track and TAA as a package, but the House considered the planks separately so members of each party could avoid voting for the half of the deal they opposed. Mrs. Pelosi’s ambush sent TAA into a tailspin, with 144 Democrats joining 158 Republicans to defeat the program 302 to 126—and with it, the larger trade measure.
When TAA was last reauthorized, in 2011, every House Democrat voted in favor, and 125 of them are still serving. The pretext three-quarters of the Democratic caucus now give for their opposition is that the subsidies aren’t generous enough. Yet the measure gives TAA $450 million in annual budget authority for six years, which is nearly double what current benefits now cost for 2.2 million people. Under the deal, any unspent dollars in the TAA slush fund carry over into the following years and eligibility expands into new industries and occupations.
By sandbagging Mr. Obama, Mrs. Pelosi’s real goal was to deny the left-right trade coalition a victory, even if that meant sacrificing some of her own favorite spending and knifing a President from her own party. She knew Republicans John Boehner and Paul Ryan had already secured the votes to pass fast track—as indeed they did. So tanking a liberal priority, with the blessing of no less than the AFL-CIO that benefits most from TAA, was her last-gasp sabotage.
Once TAA went down, the House passed fast track 219-211, though for procedural reasons that can’t be sent alone to the Senate. The ayes were composed of 191 Republicans and 28 Democrats, with 54 GOP dissenters and 157 Democrats. Despite Mrs. Pelosi’s intransigence, Republicans showed they can deliver on their pro-trade promises.
As a show of good faith, the GOP is also prepared to supply more votes than usual for TAA. Some 86 voted for TAA on Friday even though it was doomed. In 2011 TAA—Mr. Obama’s ransom for submitting George W. Bush’s Colombia and Panama trade deals for approval—passed with 118 Republicans and 189 Democrats in favor.
Thus fast track isn’t dead yet, but no one should think Friday’s fiasco is a mere “procedural snafu,” as White House spokesman Josh Earnest put it with his typically oblivious aplomb. U.S. stocks sold off on the trade defeat, with the Dow dropping 141 points or 0.8%. Failure on fast track would probably doom the 12-nation Pacific trade talks, which would undermine the economic reforms of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and send a strategic gift basket to China’s Xi Jinping. It would also vandalize the U.S. businesses that are losing overseas markets to foreign competitors.
If House Democrats really want to take political responsibility for this damage to appease the labor lobby and progressive fringe, that is their right. But then spare us the hot takes about how “Washington is broken” and that ideological Republicans are to blame. The adults in the GOP managed to fend off the talk radio and online smear campaign that by the end was simply making up fake reasons to oppose “Obamatrade.” They had to rise above what has become a trade version of a Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka and Mike Huckabee.
***
The House leadership plans to let Democrats stew over the weekend, then regroup and vote on TAA again, and maybe they’ll reconsider. That’s what happened after the Senate Democrats briefly derailed the trade debate in May. The re-vote will be a major test of whether Mr. Obama has any truck left with even Mrs. Pelosi, his heretofore most loyal ally, much less with his party that is already looking beyond his increasingly tapped-out Presidency.
The trade bill can be salvaged and the harm mitigated, especially if the House moves quickly. But the humiliation Mrs. Pelosi visited on Mr. Obama—and more to the point, her country—will be noted and remembered around the world for years to come.
Comments are closed.
