US President Barack Obama moved closer Tuesday to winning fast-track authority to clinch a huge trans-Pacific trade deal, after Senate opponents failed in their final attempt to block it. In a procedural vote, the Republican-dominated Senate voted 60-37 in favour of a bill that would allow the president to present Congress with trade accords for up-or-down votes, with no right to amend it.
Most of Obama's fellow Democrats - allied with labor unions and environmental groups - cast 'no' ballots in Tuesday's vote. But 13 jumped ship and sided with the Republican majority, which is allied with Obama on the issue of free trade. With this obstacle now narrowly skirted, senators will be able to pass, by Wednesday, the final fast-track text itself.
That would mark a triumph for Obama in a saga that has torn the Democratic Party apart in recent weeks. The House of Representatives, also controlled by the Republicans, passed the bill Thursday despite a nearly all-out rebellion by the Democrats. The bill will force up-or-down votes on any future trade bill negotiated by the US president.
Lawmakers would thus be blocked from tinkering with complex accords negotiated with other countries. In the case of the Pacific trade deal, it is a matter of 11 countries besides the United States. For the past 40 years all US presidents have enjoyed fast-track authority, such as with Mexico and Canada in the case of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
With the new bill, Obama and whoever succeeds him will have such leeway perhaps until 2021. That should help a free-trade accord in the works with the European Union. But first comes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, billed as the biggest trade accord in history. Obama wants to sign it before he leaves office in January 2017. The agreement under negotiation would comprise an estimated 40 percent of global trade. It is a sweeping pact with Japan, Australia, Canada, Chile, Vietnam and other countries.
It would create a free-trade area designed to compete with the economic might of China in the Asia-Pacific region. In a show of just how unpopular this trade accord is in progressive circles in America, even the actor Mark Ruffalo - "Hulk" in the "Avengers" movies - weighed in. "We cannot allow a trade deal that will put corporate profits above our climate, clean air and water protection," he said in a statement Monday. Environmental groups fear that environmental regulations will fall by the wayside under the trade accord.
Tuesday's vote went ahead only after Republican leaders made a concession: they agreed to pass, by the end of the week, a law aimed at helping workers who lost their jobs because of previous free trade accords. The few Democrats who agreed to side with the Republicans had demanded this and called it non-negotiable.
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