TIMELINE: The Secret Bush-Democratic Trade Deal & What It Means

This originally appeared on the Working Assets blog.

Today has been a whirlwind day on the political frontlines in the War on the Middle Class, as a handful of senior congressional Democrats and the White House - cheered on by K Street lobbyists - joined forces today to announce a "deal" on a package of trade agreements that could impact millions of American workers and potentially calls into question the entire election mandate of 2006 (I say potentially because the full details are still being concealed by both Democrats and the White House).

Because so much has transpired in the last 6 hours, I'm going to summarize it here chronologically in bullet points to make it easier to digest. I've been covering it live all day, but figured for brevity it would be best to put it in one place. For context, remember that, as Public Citizen has documented and as business publications like Forbes Magazine has confirmed, Democrats won their congressional majority in 2006 thanks to scores of challenger candidates specifically running against lobbyist-written trade policy. This 2006 lesson is particularly important to Democrats who, in the early 1990s experienced their own President campaign for office opposing unfair trade deals, then ram NAFTA through Congress "over the dead bodies" of workers, then watch the Democratic majority get decimated in the following election. I want to stress, we still don't know the details of the deal, but we do have some critically important information to analyze.

Here's the timeline of the day: