The White House and GOP, strange bedfellows on trade, have turned angrily away from each other.
They are taking pot shots at each other instead of accepting the temporary truce that is the norm in Washington when opposing political forces get hitched to support a shared legislative goal.
White House and House GOP leaders have displayed their personal hostilities this year ever since Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress to assail President Obama’s efforts to negotiate a nuke deal with Iran
The White House complained publicly and repeatedly to being unconsulted over the invitation, and now both sides make no effort to conceal lingering tensions even while pushing together for a legislative win on trade.
They are struggling to round up votes needed on both sides of the aisle to pass trade promotion authority and a massive new trade deal with 11 Asian countries, the most far-reaching tariff-reducing pact since passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the mid-1990s.
Perhaps already bracing for failure, the two sides are pointing fingers over which side is doing less to secure votes on their side of the aisle.
Several times in the past two weeks, Boehner’s office accused Obama of doing virtually nothing to build support for TPA among congressional Democrats even as he talked about its benefits. The vacuum, Republicans argue, allowed labor unions and liberals to marshal their forces against trade.
In 2014, Boehner noted that then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., killed any hope for TPA that year just days after Obama extolled its benefits in his State of the Union speech.
“Everyone knows how I feel about this,” Reid told reporters off the Senate floor at the time. “…The White House knows. Everyone would be well-advised to not push this right now.”
Boehner has spent this week excoriating Obama’s lack of progress among Democratic caucuses and challenging him to “step up his game.”
“I think we’re going to have a challenge,” Boehner said in an interview earlier in the week. “The president’s party here in Congress [is] catering to the unions who, for whatever reason, are adamantly opposed to this.
“Now at the end, I think we’ll get there because it’s hard for me to image that Democrats here in the House or Senate are going to walk away from their president.”
These comments elicited two days of sharp rebukes from the White House even while the administration pushed trade with renewed effort.
On Thursday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest chided Republicans for turning to the president to help pass one of their top agenda items.
Earnest pointed out what he called the “irony” of Republicans, who worked hard to win back the Senate majority, asking the president for help in “getting their work done.”
The president’s spokesman revived similar comments Friday about GOP leaders’ inability to corral their own members.
Libertarian and business-oriented Republicans generally support trade deals but some on the right don’t want to give Obama any new powers after years of watching him take unilateral actions which they see as executive branch power grabs — on everything from immigration to negotiations with Iran.
The president and other federal officials for weeks have said the new trade agreements are better than NAFTA because they include enforceable provisions to protect labor and the environment and the new TPA would give Obama the fast-track negotiating power to make improvements to former trade deals to address lingering problems.
The Obama administration tried to turn up the heat on Democrats Friday by releasing a report promoting the economic benefits of trade.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers said companies that export their goods pay their workers higher wages on average and also pointed out that the U.S., which largely allows imports tariff-free, is facing an average export tariff hurdle of 6.8 percent in other countries.
Obama also made a personal appeal to a group of centrist New Democrats on Thursday at the White House, although Earnest wouldn’t say how many actually attended the gathering.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., could swing a number of Democratic votes in favor of the trade bills, but so far she seems unmoved in her opposition.
Late in the week, Pelosi said the trade deals might get more votes if there were some “accommodations” to address critics’ concerns. She also took issue with a proposal that offers training for workers displaced by trade deals, arguing that it needs far more money.
But on Thursday she told reporters that so far she doesn’t see any big “movement” toward supporting the deals despite Obama’s push.
Earnest on Friday showed no willingness to modify the deals further.
“The president believes that the bills, as they exist now, merit the support of Democrats in Congress,” he said.
