Despite acknowledging that the USMCA trade deal finally slated to pass a Senate vote improves upon NAFTA, Bernie Sanders refused to back down from his opposition to the potentially landmark agreement, doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on his excoriation of the deal.
“Given the fact that climate change is right now the greatest threat facing this planet, I will not vote for a trade agreement that does not incorporate very, very strong principles to significantly lower fossil fuel emissions in the world,” the second-place 2020 contender asserted on the Democratic debate stage.
Bernie has been vociferous in his support of socialism domestically throughout his career. But only in recent years has his outright hostility toward international free trade taken center stage on the Democratic Party platform. On Tuesday night he doubled down, excoriating the trade-restrictive USMCA despite his former labor allies supporting it.
So what if the AFL-CIO supports the protectionist package backed by House Democrats? As Bernie noted, his anti-trade buddies at the Sunrise Movement opposes it, not because domestic laborers will suffer as a result, but rather because the trade deal doesn’t promulgate ecosocialist end-goals.
“We can do much better than a Trump-led trade deal,” Sanders sneered. “Every major environmental organization has said no to this new trade agreement because it does not even have the phrase ‘climate change’ in it.”
Not one statistic about the USMCA’s projected impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Not one word dedicated to the usual protectionist line about domestic workers. Not an iota of inference about foreign policy.
Bernie didn’t even add a proposed addendum to the deal tacking nuclear power or cap-and-trade to the deal. Instead, as the Left has decided, any and all trade deals are dead on arrival for the very sin of believing in trade as a principle.
Bernie made clear that even if he ran against the most anti-free trade Republican nominee in half a century, Donald Trump, he’s still so dogmatic to the cult of climate sacrifice that he’ll hurt American workers in the process. For Trump, that would be a win.
