Democratic Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is delaying passage of President Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement to ensure maximum Democratic support and predicted the trade deal will pass next month.
The congressman said Pelosi wants to demonstrate that leadership addressed all concerns within the party about the deal. “I think there has to be some internal dynamics within the party that have to be addressed, but I think we are almost there to go,” Cuellar told the Washington Examiner. “I feel good that we are going to do it in December.”
Cuellar, 64, a House Appropriations Committee member who has strongly backed the trade deal to replace the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, said the final version of the deal could include the U.S. Congress appropriating some funding for Mexico to ensure it can enforce the trade’s deal provisions. “Depending on what the needs are and what their requests are, I think you will find that both the U.S. and Canada will be ready to help Mexico in any way [if] they request money for training, technical advice, etc., etc.,” he said.
While there is support for USMCA inside the caucus, it still isn’t a majority, said Cuellar, who is of Mexican descent and represents a border district. “I have been polling and have a very detailed list of where we think members will fall or could fall,” he said. “I’ve done this by talking to members personally, by talking to different groups: agriculture groups, manufacturing groups, and the Chamber of Commerce.”
A key issue for many members is what organized labor says, according to Cuellar, who said that Democratic leadership would settle for labor deciding not to oppose the deal.
In a speech Monday evening, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said labor still wasn’t ready to back the deal. “Until the administration can show us in writing that the new NAFTA is truly enforceable with stronger labor standards, there is still more work to be done,” he said in a speech at the Maryland State and D.C. AFL-CIO 32nd Biennial Convention.
We are in a position of tremendous strength. Our allies on Capitol Hill understand that getting this done right is more important than getting it done fast. #NAFTA
— Richard Trumka (@RichardTrumka) November 19, 2019
Yet, Cuellar said critics who say that USMCA still has serious enforcement issues shouldn’t be viewed as deciding the trade deal’s fate. “There are certain people, and I’m not going to name names, who are always going to vote ‘no’ on trade.” He said the Mexican government under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had already made historic changes to its labor laws to accommodate the trade deal, and that the Trump administration and Democratic leaders are addressing lingering issues about whether individual Mexican states, as opposed to its federal government, would carry out the sought-after reforms.
He also scolded critics of the deal for saying that Mexico cannot be trusted to follow through with the reforms. “We cannot be playing father or mother to another country, saying that we know better than they do,” he said. “Mexico has done the things we have asked them to do on labor, on enforcement, on money.”
