House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that a deal on passage of President Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade is near but that it is up to the administration to commit to specific language meeting Democrats’ demands.
“We are within range of a substantially improved agreement for America’s workers,” Pelosi said Monday. “Now, we need to see our progress in writing from the [U.S.] trade representative for final review.”
Only a narrow window remains in the congressional schedule next month to vote on the trade deal this year.
Pelosi said that Democrats, led by Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, had negotiated on changes to the deal that “address the concerns of America’s working families.”
Pelosi’s statement came after accusations by both Trump and Mexico’s top negotiator that the deal was finished but that Pelosi was refusing to schedule a vote at the insistence of organized labor.
“It is sitting on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. She’s incapable of moving it, it looks like,” Trump told reporters Monday. “She hasn’t wanted to do it because, I understand, a couple of the unions, the AFL-CIO, they are asking her to hold it for a while because it’ll make Trump look bad.”
Mexico’s top negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister for North America Jesus Seade, told reporters in Mexico City Monday that U.S. labor leaders had become emboldened to make demands. “Far from reaching a deal, in the last two weeks, statements from certain labor sectors have reemerged, floating ideas that would be totally unacceptable to Mexico,” he said.
Last week, Pelosi had told reporters that a deal was still out of reach and that a vote this year was unlikely. Pelosi defended the delay in Monday’s statement, saying the USMCA lacked enforcement features, a complaint Democrats have repeatedly made. “Above all, the NAFTA 2.0 draft lacked the concrete, effective enforcement mechanisms needed to ensure that the agreement became more than a list of promises on paper,” she said.
However, Mexico has amended its laws on labor to conform with the USMCA, and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has vowed in a letter to Democrats to enforce those labor reforms.
