Democratic leaders resisted calls from President Trump Tuesday to allow Congress to vote on his U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, despite Mexico’s passage this week of labor reforms they’d had long demanded as part of the deal.
The Democrats said they were still concerned about whether that Mexico would live up to its promises, indicating a vote on the trade deal may still be a ways off.
“We talked about we need much more adequate enforcement of labor protections. We brought up the [USMCA’s] pharmaceutical provision and we brought up environmental protections,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters following a meeting at the White House with Trump. “They were very eager to figure what we needed to pass it.”
Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democrats went to the White House to discuss infrastructure spending, but Schumer said Trump was just as eager to discuss USMCA. “He went off-topic repeatedly. The number one subject he went off-topic on was USMCA,” Schumer said. “They kept asking, [White House economic adviser Larry] Kudlow in particular, who was there, ‘What do you need to pass it?'”
The White House wanted to get a House vote on the deal, which would replace the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, for months, but Pelosi has held off scheduling one, saying Democrats wanted Mexico to act first. The Mexican legislature finally passed the reforms Monday, but Democrats remain noncommittal.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, an ally to Democrats, balked at having a vote, saying further negotiations were needed. “If we were forced to do take it as it is, incomplete and unenforceable, or leave it, we would have to leave it,” he told MSNBC.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction on the matter, told the Washington Examiner the Mexican reforms were “a major step toward” that “could reduce one incentive for American companies to outsource jobs — a central problem in the old NAFTA.” But he stopped short of saying that the Congress should now vote on USMCA, arguing instead, “We now must see implementation and meaningful enforcement of these reforms.”
The Democrats’ stance left Republicans frustrated. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, noted Tuesday that the Mexican reforms follow a mostly positive analysis last week of USMCA by the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency. “Good ITC report + Mexican labor reforms passed = time to lift steel/aluminum tariffs & for Speaker Pelosi to play ball CONGRESS MUST PASS USMCA THIS YR,” Grassley tweeted.
Critics of Mexico’s labor system have long argued that it allows employers to corruptly influence union elections. Monday’s reforms require that workers have secret ballots in elections as well as when ratifying collective bargaining contracts, a change meant to ensure that the unions are independent of management’s influence.
