Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
Today's agreements aren't focused on lowering barriers, but harmonizing global regulations at the cost of sovereignty....
Fast track commits Congress to an up-or-down vote on whatever the president’s trade negotiators deliver, without the possibility of filibuster in the Senate or further amendments. It thus streamlines and expedites the process of Congressional approval: under fast track, trade deals get special treatment unavailable to other kinds of legislation. And without fast track, it is unlikely that President Obama will be able to pass two controversial trade agreements with our Asian and European allies and competitors.
Fast track approval in the House now hinges crucially on Republican votes because most Democrats are bucking their president to vote against his trade agenda. But why are so many conservatives willing to trust the Obama administration on this issue, while otherwise trying to thwart it at every turn?
Conservatives are caught between their general support for “free trade” and a concern to uphold American national sovereignty. The support for free trade doesn’t just come from a general pro-business orientation; it reflects an older idea that trade unencumbered by government regulation is not only good for business, but good for individuals and for society as a whole, continuous with rights of property and liberty generally.
But today’s trade agreements aren’t really about free trade, at least not as traditionally understood. They are efforts to achieve regulatory harmonization across borders, initiatives in what is now called “global governance.” They don’t keep the state out of the marketplace so much as bring it in, on selective terms, to favor powerful corporate interests at the expense of national sovereignty.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the new enthusiasm for special “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) mechanisms. ISDS gives foreign corporations the right to sue national governments for regulations that interfere with their expected profits. It allows multinational litigants to bypass the national courts and instead empowers panels of private arbitrators—most of whom are practicing attorneys who cycle in and out of arbitral work—the right to sit in judgment of national laws. These arbitrators owe no special allegiance to any particular system of justice. They are not bound by precedent, and what precedent there is has often been developed by earlier ad hoc panels, not judges vested with constitutional authority. And the decisions of ISDS panels are typically final, not subject to review by any higher court.
The inclusion of ISDS in the proposed trade deals shows just how far the trade agenda has been transformed in recent decades. The old trade agenda—the plan to bring down tariffs in the postwar era—was largely successful. Tariffs are now lower than they have ever been and, in many sectors, almost gone altogether. But instead of declaring victory, the trade agenda morphed into something else: a subtle and ongoing push to integrate regulatory regimes across borders. Obama’s trade agreements represent a vigorous new effort to construct new global rules that go beyond simply freeing up trade to bind individual nations to new international regulations.
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But the choice for conservatives should be clear. A vote for fast track is not, at root, a vote for free trade. Rather, it is a vote to grant the White House broad authority to make treaties, in secret, for a new era of global economic governance.
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http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-fast-track-isnt-free-trade/
