“I‘m a believer that we should read legislation before we vote on it,” said Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Saturday. It “boggles the mind” that the White House has not released the 800-page text of the trade deal it’s pressuring legislators to support, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“Who’s in charge of the administration that decides to keep a trade treaty secret?” said Paul in an interview with Breitbart News. “To keep it classified makes no sense at all.”
Paul “went ballistic,” according to Breitbart, when they told him that fellow candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and many in the Republican Party voted to fast-track the TPP in the Senate, with the support of several members in the House Republican leadership.
Many of the bill’s supporters have not read the text of the deal in the secret room inside the Capitol. Although Rubio has made support for the deal a centerpiece of his campaign’s foreign policy, he has refused to answer whether he read the bill.
“Under ‘fast track,’ Congress transfers its authority to the executive and agrees to give up several of its most basic powers,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said to Breitbart in a separate interview. “These concessions include: the power to write legislation, the power to amend legislation, the power to fully consider legislation on the floor, the power to keep debate open until Senate cloture is invoked, and the constitutional requirement that treaties receive a two-thirds vote.”
“Through ‘fast track,’ Congress would be pre-clearing a political and economic union before a word of that arrangement has been made available to a single private citizen,” said Sessions.
“To me, it’s kind of you put the cart before the horse to give the permission to do something you haven’t seen,” Paul said. “They claim you’ll get to see it, again but you’ll only get an up-or-down vote with no amendments. Also, they get rid of some of the rules on — I guess it’s not, you can’t filibuster it either. It passes with a simple majority.”
Paul explained that the bills are too long and legislators are not given enough time to read them. “I have a bill called Read The Bills Act, and in it there’s a requirement that you have to wait one day for every 20 pages of legislation,” he said.
“So 800-page legislation [like the TPP] would wait 40 days. You’d wait 40 days so we’d have adequate time to read it. Yeah, I’m a believer that we should read legislation before we vote on it,” said Paul.
Secretary of State John Kerry said the final text of the trade deal will be made public at least 60 days before Obama signs it, even as GOP leadership pushes to fast-track the expansion of Obama’s powers.
