Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, is issuing one final clarion call against Obamatrade as the House readies to vote on the matter on Friday. Sessions’ final “critical alert,” one of several he’s issued throughout the Obamatrade process, shows House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)has been engaged in deception as he attempts to guide Obamatrade’s passage through the House.
“Promoters of fast-track executive authority have relied on semantic obfuscation in an effort to deny the obvious: the President’s top priority is obtaining fast-track authority because he knows it will expand his powers and allow him to cement his legacy through the formation of a new political and economic union,” Sessions said.
If, as promoters amazingly suggest, the President had more powers without fast-track, he would veto it. The authority granted in “Trade Promotion Authority” is authority transferred from Congress to the Executive and, ultimately, to international bureaucrats. The entire purpose of fast-track is for Congress to surrender its power to the Executive for six years. Legislative concessions include: control over the content of legislation, the power to fully consider that legislation on the floor, the power to keep debate open until Senate cloture is invoked, and the constitutional requirement that treaties receive a two-thirds vote. Legislation cannot even be amended.
It’s unclear what will happen when it does come up for a vote on Friday in the House, but one thing is absolutely certain: Pass or fail, Ryan’s credibility on the right is shot. What’s more, there’s likely to be a conservative grassroots rebellion against establishment Republicans in Washington that may dwarf the one Obamacare caused back in 2010.
Without granting Obama fast-track authority, Sessions notes that Congress remains in charge of trade policy and negotiations. Congress would keep the ability to amend trade deals and the Senate would still have power to filibuster against them—but that’s only if the House shoots down TPA on Friday. If the House passes TPA, there’s no telling what President Obama might do with the new power Congress would be ceding to him.
“By contrast, without fast-track, Congress retains all of its legislative powers, individual members retain all of their procedural tools, and every single line, jot, and tittle of trade text is publicly available before any congressional action is taken,” Sessions said.
Another obfuscation is the suggestion that TPP doesn’t yet exist. To the contrary, it has been under negotiation for six years and lawmakers can enter a closed-door, walled-off chamber to review it. A vote for fast-track is a vote to authorize the President to ink the secret deal contained in these pages—to affix his name on the Union and to therefore enter the United States into it.
“The so-called negotiating objectives in the fast-track bill are merely for show,” Nucor Steel chairman emeritus Dan DiMicco says, according to Sessions. “The President can and does sign the agreement before Congress views or votes on it.”
Sessions then wrote how fast-track authority is “the action that empowers the President to put America’s name on the deal sitting in that walled-off room—before a page of it has been shared with the public.”
From there, Sessions went straight after Ryan.
In a Ways and Means document on the new Pacific Union being formed by Obama, the Committee hints at some of this union’s powers: ‘if a proposed change to a trade agreement is contemplated [by the TPP Commission] that would require a change in U.S. law, all of TPA’s congressional notification, consultation, and transparency requirements would apply. In other words, Ways and Means is intimating that this new secret Pacific Union would function like a third house of Congress, with legislative primacy, sending changes to the House and Senate under fast-track procedures (receiving less legislative procedure than, for instance, Post Office reform).
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