The House and Senate on Wednesday took a rare day off from interparty bickering to pass three free-trade agreements endorsed by President Obama.
“It’s a bipartisan day,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Wednesday prior to a scheduled late-night vote and certain passage of trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
In the House, Republican and Democratic support was expected to push the three trade bills to easy passage, with both parties promoting the measures as job-creating legislation.
“This will cut in half the average 8 percent tariffs that U.S. exporters face,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., said. “This levels the playing field for our exporters.”
Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., called the trade agreements “a one-way street going in our direction” and said the accords will open up new markets for U.S. exporters, which would subsequently create American jobs.
A considerable number of Democrats in the House and Senate opposed one or more of the trade deals. Most of them are from manufacturing states that hemorrhaged jobs after the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement became law. They warned that the three new agreements would add to an estimated 600,000 jobs lost over the past 17 years as a result of NAFTA and smaller trade deals despite assurances that those deals would create jobs.
“They are more of the same broken promises,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said of promises being made about the new trio of trade deals. “The trade agreements simply aren’t working. We may sell a few more things to other countries, but we will buy a lot more from other countries.”
In the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said lawmakers should refrain from passing the trade pacts until Congress approves a measure that would force China to stop undervaluing its currency.
The Senate on Tuesday approved a bill that would punish China for manipulating its currency. Despite broad Republican support for the measure, the House has no intention of taking up a bill targeting China’s currency manipulation because the GOP leadership believes it could start a trade war with the world’s second-largest economy. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said it would be “dangerous” to take up such a bill.
Pelosi’s stance puts her at odds with Obama, who is supporting the trade bills.
Passage of the bills comes after five years of negotiating between Congress and the White House. Republican leaders have been demanding Obama send the trade agreements to Congress and he did so only after lawmakers agreed to take up a trade adjustment assistance measure that would provide financial help for workers who lose their jobs as a result of the new trade agreements.
The debate on the trade bills comes a day after the Senate rejected the president’s $447 billion jobs package.
Republicans in the House said they have their own jobs agenda that relies in part on the free-trade agreements, which economists believe will particularly benefit the nation’s farmers.
Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., said his state would help increase the state’s exportation of apples and potatoes by lifting steep tariffs, “allowing us to regain our market share or at least compete on a level playing field.”
