President Obama has given up on efforts to get lawmakers in his own party to back a “fast track” trade package that stalled in the House last week, a top Democrat said Tuesday.
“It has now been abandoned, essentially,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters in a briefing.
Republican lawmakers had called on Obama to work with Democrats over the weekend in order to come up with enough votes to move the legislation by a Tuesday deadline. But Hoyer said the plan never had much of a chance of succeeding.
“I think the thought was we can cobble together the votes for it and then send [the legislation] to the president,” Hoyer said. “I think clearly they concluded that was not going to work.”
Hoyer’s office stressed later that Hoyer was only saying that the effort to pass the package today has been abandoned, not the overall White House effort to pass it at some point. An aide to Hoyer stressed that he was not saying Obama has given up all hope of a trade deal.
But Hoyer also spoke with some finality about the chances of getting more Democrats to support the deal. “I never thought that was going to be a very successful effort, and I think it proved not to be,” he said.
“I don’t think they are going to get a lot of Democrats to change on TAA,” Hoyer added, according to a transcript provided to Huffington Post. “There were 40 of us that voted for TAA, which meant the Republicans would have needed 100 and what, 78? And I don’t think there are 178 votes on the Republican side, as we saw, to vote for TAA.”
It was also becoming clear on Tuesday that House Republicans were going to use the next several weeks to find a new way to pass elements of the trade bill, possibly through votes on a new measure that wouldn’t require Democratic support for passage.
The president made a personal appeal to Democrats on Friday and shortly after he left the Capitol, Democrats voted overwhelmingly to reject the trade deal.
Hoyer said that among Democrats, “some people were put off,” by Obama’s visit, in which he asked them to “play it straight” on the legislation and not sink it by voting against a companion measure to extend aid to workers displaced by trade deals.
Democrats say they are opposed to the measure because it lacks tough trade enforcement provisions and would kill U.S. manufacturing jobs.
House Republican lawmakers will move today to extend consideration of the trade package until July 31. The extension would give both House lawmakers and Obama time to come up with a plan that could win enough votes to pass legislation to provide Obama with expedited powers to secure trade deals, as well as a measure to extend a program that provides aid to workers displaced by trade deals.
