Is Obama’s Quest for Trade Promotion Authority One More Example of Executive Overreach?

 

Some conservatives may worry that supporting President Obama’s bid for trade promotion authority undermines their criticism of his abuses of the Constitution’s executive power, an angle that was highlighted in a Washington Post story by David Nakamura earlier this week. We needn’t fret about these claimed contradictions, however — they are product of intellectually lazy or sloppy journalists who don’t understand the Constitution’s separation of powers in the first place.

The most important difference between trade promotion authority — informally known as “fast-track” among the trade cognoscenti — and Obama’s unilateral orders on immigration, drugs, healthcare, welfare (take your pick) is that Congress has authorized the former. With trade authority, Congress delegates authority to the President to negotiate the best deal possible with our foreign partners, but he has no opportunity to put the agreement into effect himself. Congress still has an up-or-down vote on the trade deal.

Trade authority would be akin to Obama’s other abuses of authority only if the White House simply negotiated and then put into effect a trade deal without any congressional approval. I am not, however, claiming that President Obama suddenly has a newfound respect for the Constitution when it comes to treaties — as John Bolton and I argued in a recent issue of National Review, the Administration is currently considering unconstitutional methods to reach a deal with Iran, among others.

A second difference between trade promotion authority and Obama’s abuses rests in how TPA works, which I fear escapes the kind of liberals that are accusing conservatives of hypocrisy. Trade promotion doesn’t actually give the President any authority he does not currently have. Obama, like his predecessors, can negotiate any trade deals that he likes. But they are just empty words on paper until Congress approves them. TPA only represents a limitation on Congress — passed by Congress — in how it will consider trade deals for approval. In the past, Congress made trade difficult by seeking to amend the agreements, which would require new rounds of negotiations and would delay the deals for years, if not decades. Other nations would not take the United States’s proposals seriously if they knew that Congress might cross them out during legislative review.

In TPAs of the past, Congress promised to give trade agreements an expedited schedule and to allow them an up-or-down vote without amendments. Only Congress has the constitutional authority to decide its own rules, and that is all it is doing with the TPA. Congress can still always vote down the agreement. Without the legislative branch’s consent, the President’s trade deals will amount to nothing.

 

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  1. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Perfectly put.

    • #1
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