Twelve Republican senators are urging President Donald Trump to seek swift passage of his renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement to avoid challenges the deal will face when Democrats take control of the House in January.
In a letter led by Pennsylvanian Pat Toomey, the senators argued that it would be legally possible under Trade Promotion Authority to cut short the anticipated timeline for approval of the pact—sometime next fall—if the White House were to submit final text and statements of administrative action before the end of the month, triggering a 30-day countdown before Congress could act on it.
That would make room for the trade deal at the very end of the year. It would bypass several important procedural steps, such as the release of the U.S. International Trade Commission’s report on the deal, as well as time allotted for industry feedback, and the move would be certain to provoke outrage among Democrats. And while it may be technically possible under the law, trade experts still view such an idea as a Hail Mary of sorts, and they question whether the White House would actually be prepared to submit the required documents by next week in order to pull it off.
“We are concerned that if the administration waits until next year to send to Congress a draft implementing bill, passage of the USMCA as negotiated will become significantly more difficult,” the GOP senators write in the letter.
Trump is expected to sign the deal, which he has re-branded the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires next week. Tensions remain between Trump and Mexican and Canadian officials, however, as his controversial Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum have not been removed under the revised trade agreement.
Toomey was joined on the letter by 11 trade-supporting senators including Lamar Alexander, Steve Daines, Deb Fischer, Jeff Flake, Ron Johnson, Jon Kyl, James Lankford, Mike Lee, Rob Portman, Ben Sasse, and Ted Cruz.
“Entrusting House Democrats with passing the USMCA is a dicey proposition, at best,” Toomey wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday. “Many of the newly elected Democrats ran on opposition to all things Trump, and the next House speaker will not prioritize passage of President Trump’s signature trade achievement.”
Toomey has criticized aspects of the new trade deal for the opposite reasons that Democrats have been wary of the agreement. Democrats in the House have expressed concern that new labor and auto parts requirements for auto manufacturing in Mexico may not go far enough to protect American workers, whereas Toomey has criticized some of the deal’s new regulations as burdensome and expensive for companies to comply with.
The deal would require 30 percent of laborers in Mexican auto manufacturing process to be paid at least $16 an hour, increasing to 40 percent by 2023. It also includes some improvements for digital trade, such as a long-desired increase in Canada’s de minimis threshold (above which extra duties and processing are imposed) on purchases from foreign online retailers.
Toomey argues that passing the deal in an all-Republican Congress would avoid the need to make additional concessions to labor and environmental groups under a Democratic House.
Another fear has played into the effort to approve the deal before the end of the year: If Democrats don’t take up Trump’s trade deal, Toomey and his GOP colleagues worry, it may goad Trump “into responding with the ‘nuclear option’—a unilateral withdrawal from the existing NAFTA,” the Pennsylvania Republican wrote in his op-ed. “This would be disastrous for the American economy, and would kick off a constitutional battle between the branches over trade power.”
Yet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated the deal isn’t on his priority list for the remainder of the 115th Congress. “That will be a next year issue because the process we have to go through doesn’t allow that to come up before the end of this year,” he said in a Bloomberg interview last month.
