Name: Jason Kearns
Title: Minority chief trade counsel, House Ways and Means Committee
Hometown: Keenesburg, Colo.
Age: 45
Alma mater: University of Denver, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Harvard Kennedy School
Washington Examiner: How did you get involved in trade?
Kearns: As an undergraduate, I majored in economics and almost accidentally ended up getting a second major in Russian language as well. But I didn’t expect to do anything along those lines after. I went to law school immediately after and wanted to end up being a judge and to return to Colorado where I’m from. That was the game plan.
Then, after law school, I went to work at a law firm in Chicago, doing litigation. It was there that a partner called me up one day, in a bit of an emergency, and said that the one lawyer they had in their office in Kyrgyzstan, the one American lawyer, had left, and they looked at my resume, saw that I spoke Russian like they do in Kyrgyzstan and was hoping that maybe I would go out there to let the employees know we weren’t abandoning ship and that we would be around.
Examiner: I knew there would be a Kyrgyzstan connection.
Kearns: Yeah, right? There always is.
So I went to Kyrgyzstan, and halfway through that I talked to a colleague of mine who was in our Uzbekistan office — always the Uzbek connection, too — and she had gone to the Kennedy School of Government and told me how much she liked it. And I thought, you know, I gotta find some way to get back to the U.S., I don’t really want to go back to the exact same thing I was doing before, so I went to the Kennedy School.
That’s where I studied international trade and finance, and that then led to internships with the U.S. Trade Representative, and with the World Trade Organization, and that then led to first a law firm here doing trade for three years and then going to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office for three years, and from there up here for the past 10.
I didn’t plan it this way, but it really originated in college studying Russian language I guess.
Examiner: How was the experience of living in Kyrgyzstan?
Kearns: Well, my fiancee — my fiancee at the time — it was good for us because it was a good way to really get to know someone. You don’t have a whole lot of distractions, so we really spent a lot time together during those nine months. It’s a pretty small expat community. It was good.
My parents would send us videotapes of television shows and we’d end up watching the commercials. Don’t skip over the commercials, because we only have three hours of video here, so we watch every last minute of it.
It was a great experience. It’s a beautiful country, we really enjoyed it.
Examiner: You obviously have been involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation trade deal currently being negotiated among Pacific nations, for a long time now. How do you handle that, working on a years-long project like that that’s very politically sensitive and very detailed? How do you handle the day-to-day grind of that?
Kearns: Yeah, it has been a day-to-day grind for several years now. It’s super interesting. It’s what I like about my job. I have to understand the policies, I have to understand the legal issues and I have to understand the politics.
So it has been a grind, and you know, it has been frustrating in a lot of ways. As you probably know, we’re not supportive of this TPP and have been disappointed where things have landed. The process has been a great learning experience and a real challenge.
What I like, especially working for [House Ways and Means ranking Democrat Sander Levin of Michigan], Mr. Levin is very detail oriented and wants to know everything about the agreement. That’s not always good for my work-life balance, but, you know, obviously it’s great working for a member who really wants you to dig in and understand everything. It makes it a good challenge, I think.
Examiner: What do you do when you’re not thinking about trade policy, for fun?
Kearns: Well, there’s what I do, and there’s what I do for fun. I have three kids, and so I spend a lot of time at basketball, soccer and softball games recently, and that’s fun, although it’s getting to be a bit much.
I do lots of different sports. Triathlons, we go out to Colorado whenever we can to go skiing or hiking, and reading as much as I can outside of TPP.
Examiner: What’s at the top of your reading list right now?
Kearns: Right now I’m reading two books: A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago, great book so far, fiction. And a book about the history of jazz — Visions of Jazz, by Gary Giddins.
Examiner: Are you a jazz fan?
Kearns: I am a jazz fan. Not as knowledgeable as I’d want to be, but that’s why I’m reading the book.
Examiner: Who do you listen to?
Kearns: I love Miles Davis, always loved Miles Davis — earlier stuff, not so much his later stuff.
And always loved Louis Armstrong, too. My wife’s from New Orleans, and so definitely love Louis Armstrong. And Billie Holliday, I guess — that would be my top three.
Examiner: What else should people know about you?
Kearns: To me, understanding what I do depends a lot on understanding Mr. Levin and his commitment to trade and commitment to understanding the substance of all this.
One time we were working on a bilateral investment treaty issue and I sent him a long memo, a 15-page memo on all the issues, and he wrote back and said, well, send me the bilateral investment treaty — I want to read it, too.
But I really enjoy working for somebody who, first of all, understands these issues, who’s trying to do the right thing, trying to shape trade — recognizing that there are benefits to trade, and who wants to shape trade to spread those benefits as broadly as he can. Somebody who works as hard as he does — it’s rewarding in a lot of ways.
Examiner: You’re saying he read the actual treaty?
Kearns: The bilateral investment treaty, yes.
