The U.S. Senate voted 52-45 on Tuesday against a bill that would grant President Barack Obama a “fast track” to close the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal. This outcome not only marks a defeat for one of Obama’s trade priorities, but also highlights the challenges he faces within his party ranks.
The TPP is a multilateral trade agreement among 12 countries that together represent approximately 40 percent of world GDP and nearly a third of world exports. Chile, Mexico and Peru are the three countries from Latin America that are included in the agreement.
In a joint press conference with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in April, Obama said, “TPP will help level the playing field. [It] will have strong protections for workers and the environment and help us set high standards for trade in the 21st century.”
Yesterday’s results fell just shy of the 60 votes Obama needed to enact a legislative procedure known as Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which enables trade deals such as the TPP to be voted on by Congress with a “yes” or “no” approval without amendment. Congress has enacted TPA since 1974, but it expired on July 1, 2007. Under current law, the trade promotion authority must be voted on and renewed by Congress every two years.
Democrats have been the most vocal opponents of the TPP. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren co-authored an opinion piece in the Boston Globe with Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro earlier this month, citing corporate influence and a lack of transparency as reasons to reject the deal.
“Powerful corporate interests have spent a lot of time and money trying to bend Washington’s rules to benefit themselves, and now they want Congress to grease the skids for a TPP deal that corporations have helped write but the public can’t see,” they said.
In addition to these issues, other bipartisan concerns about the TPP include the lack of provisions on human trafficking, currency manipulation, child labor laws, displaced workers, and unfair trade practices, among others. These pending concerns reveal that TPA is not the only hurdle the TPP deal is facing right now.
After the vote, Obama called on ten Senate Democrats who had publicly backed the fast track provisions in order to discuss the outcome and work on a strategy to get the votes he needs. The outcome of these discussions are yet to be disclosed, but will certainly shed more light on the future of TPP.
