Shenanigans In Congress Over The TPP Trade Deal

How the Shenanigans in Congress Over the TPP Trade Deal Threatens the Fundamentals of Our Democracy

Progressives scored a victory but it's only round one.

By Bill Moyers, Bernard Weisberger / BillMoyers.com

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Drop of Light / Shutterstock.com

Pro-democracy forces won a big victory Friday when they stalled the top-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement backed by the White House and the Republican leadership in Congress.
But it’s only Round One. The unholy trio of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (who has vowed to keep any of Obama’s nominees from being confirmed), Speaker of the House John Boehner (who has thwarted just about every Democratic legislative proposal of the past several years), and President Obama (a Democrat, in case you are having trouble remembering) are as one in a desperate effort to rescue their Frankenstein-like creation.
Their only hope is to bribe, browbeat, or brainwash enough House members to change their minds. It could happen. The journalist John R. MacArthur, writing late last week in the Providence Journal, tells how New York Democrat Kathleen Rice flip-flopped. Not long ago, she opposed fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership because she worried it would not “protect her district’s working families.” As well she might; this agreement is everything the giant corporations want; it decidedly wasn’t written with working people in mind.

But last week, Rep. Rice suddenly stopped worrying about those workers and went over to the other side, voting in favor of fast-tracking one of the most massive giveaways to multinational companies ever -- including corporations that have been shipping jobs overseas and pocketing their swollen off-shore profits to avoid taxes.
How in the world could Rice betray her working-class constituents, the people who trusted her to look after their interests? What changed her mind? For one thing, the president assured turncoats like Rice that he would “have their back” if he had their votes. We can’t know what that means, writes John MacArthur, “since the political deals that grease the way for unpopular legislation aren’t ordinarily announced in press releases or high-minded op-eds. The nasty facts tend to come out later, after the damage has been done.” 

For now, we can only rub our eyes at the spectacle. Look at this headline in The Washington Post after Democrats defeated the Obama-McConnell-Boehner-Republican cabal on Friday: “New questions arise about House Democratic caucus’s loyalty to Obama.” 

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