To their credit, President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — along with 28 pro-trade House Democrats — decided to fight on after anti-free-trade House Democrats used procedural legerdemain to block Obama’s trade agenda last week. There was too much at stake for the country, economically and geopolitically, to let opponents have the last word. What’s more, the White House and its congressional allies appear to have come up with a workable Plan B. Success may depend, though, on a relative handful of Senate Democrats, including three from Virginia and Maryland.
To their credit, President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — along with 28 pro-trade House Democrats — decided to fight on after anti-free-trade House Democrats used procedural legerdemain to block Obama’s trade agenda last week. There was too much at stake for the country, economically and geopolitically, to let opponents have the last word. What’s more, the White House and its congressional allies appear to have come up with a workable Plan B. Success may depend, though, on a relative handful of Senate Democrats, including three from Virginia and Maryland.
Here’s why. Plan A for passing Obama’s trade agenda was to link passage of two bills: trade-promotion authority, which enables the president to strike a deal with trading partners and submit it to Congress for an expedited vote, and aid for those displaced by trade, which is both helpful to workers and a political sweetener for trade-skeptical Democrats. Now that House Democrats have scuttled that plan, Obama and his allies propose to pass trade-promotion and worker-assistance bills as separate measures. They are no longer linked in legislative text but instead through a public promise from the White House and the leaders of the House and Senate that the worker-aid bill, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, will indeed move through Congress next week promptly after trade-promotion authority does.
The House fulfilled its part of this plan by passing trade-promotion authority, again, on Thursday. The plan can’t advance, though, without 60 “yeses” in the Senate to proceed on Tuesday morning — and that will require support from most of the 14 Senate Democrats who backed the bill in its previous iteration, when it was formally combined with worker assistance. Opponents of trade-promotion authority are therefore urging this group to reverse its past votes for the measure, on the grounds that McConnell and Boehner can’t be trusted to deliver on worker aid as a separate bill. Some Democrats even intimate that they might try to vote down the worker-aid bill in the House again, the idea being this would pressure Obama into vetoing trade-promotion authority because he promised to get both.
Enough, already. Can McConnell and Boehner be trusted? Even assuming that no one in Washington is any more trustworthy than it is in his interest to be, they have a very strong interest in keeping their word in this case — both because they favor the policy course to which they have committed and because of the negative repercussions if they fail to deliver. For the same reasons, Obama is obviously telling the truth when he says he wants to sign both the trade-promotion and worker-assistance bills. But it would be foolhardy for House Democrats to test him on that, because they might well end up losing worker-assistance, too.
Here is the bottom line, for Sens. Mark Warner and Timothy Kaine of Virginia, Sen. Benjamin Cardin of Maryland and the other 11 Democrats who have voted for trade- promotion once already: The right thing to do, voting yes again on Tuesday, is also the smart thing to do.
— Washington Post