Emanuel blocks debate on trade deal

Posted by David Sirota at 7:19 AM on May 16, 2007.

This blog originally appeared on Working For Change

Breaking news out of Washington today, five days after a handful of senior Democrats and the Bush administration announced a secret deal to push a package of free trade pacts just months after Democrats successfully used opposition to lobbyist-written trade deals to win the 2006 election. According to sources on Capitol Hill today, after the six Democrats followed Democratic Caucus rules and filed a formal letter to Emanuel requesting a caucus meeting. That request, according to the Hill Newspaper , was "rebuffed" and hours after the letter was sent, Democratic leaders appeared at a press conference to announce the secret trade deal with the Bush administration. The legislative language of the deal has still not been released either to reporters or to rank-and-file lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, industry newsletter Inside U.S. Trade this afternoon reports that House Ways and Means Ranking Member Jim McCrery (R-LA) "said it is his preference and that of U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab that the new obligations for free trade agreements announced last week not lead to a reopening of the Peru free trade agreement." This follow's McCrery's claim yesterday that the secret deal can be completed "in a way that does not require Peru's political system to revisit the deal all over again."

In laymans terms, the enforceability of the promised labor and environmental provisions hinge on the Peru and Panama free trade agreements being reopened so that their texts can be modified. As NAFTA has shown, so-called "side agreements" that are not written into the text of the actual trade texts have proven entirely unenforceable because they are not part of the core agreement. If the Peru and Panama deals are not, in fact, going to be reopened and renegotiated, then the highly touted promises of adding enforceable labor and environmental provisions to the core texts of trade agreements appear to be in question.

McCrery and Schwab's move may explain why the Bush-connected head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has told reporters he has received "assurances that the labor provisions [in the deal] cannot be read to require compliance." It may also explain why the dealmakers have yet to release the legislative language of the trade deal texts in question. If they are planning to not actually change the texts of the deals and pass them as is, there may not actually be any new language, meaning there would likely not be any substantive change to U.S. trade policy, despite the flood of press releases.

Freshmen House Democrats, many of whom have signed letters demanding to the Democratic leadership respect the 2006 Election mandate against lobbyist-written trade policy, are scheduled to attend a regular breakfast with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Wednesday morning. Sources say it is probable that the trade issue could be put front and center at that breakfast by the group of lawmakers.

UPDATE: Responding to the reporting of this story, a spokeswoman for Emanuel's office this emails to say that the cancellation of the trade debate occurred because of "time constraints" and that Emanuel has now promised the caucus "we would continue with our plan to have a trade-focused caucus meeting soon." He did not set a date certain for that meeting.

Tagged as: bush administration, emanuel, trade deal

David Sirota is the author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back (Crown, 2006).