WASHINGTON — The House overwhelmingly approved a revised North American trade pact by a vote of 385 to 41 on Thursday, giving President Trump and the Democratic majority an improbable legislative victory less than 24 hours after Mr. Trump was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.
The implementing legislation for the revised United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement marked the culmination of months of negotiations among the Trump administration, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a group of Democratic lawmakers, an unlikely collaboration in the midst of a highly fraught impeachment inquiry.
For Mr. Trump, the deal represents the fulfillment of a signature campaign promise: to overhaul the much-maligned North American Free Trade Agreement, signed a quarter of a century ago. But after months of closed-door negotiations with Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, House Democrats were also able to put their own stamp on the final deal with new language that strengthened labor, environmental, pharmaceutical and enforcement provisions.
As a result of the changes Democrats secured — and Republican eagerness to back a critical legislative priority for the president — the pact saw a stunning range of support in the lower chamber. Just hours after a virtually party-line bid to remove Mr. Trump from office, a majority of lawmakers — including opponents of the original NAFTA deal and others known for a fierce aversion to trade pacts — joined the majority of the caucus in giving their approval to their agreement.
In 1993, NAFTA passed the House on a vote of 234 to 200 and has since been excoriated by both Democrats and Republicans as contributing to an outflow of jobs from the United States to Mexico.
“We really have offered a new construct for trade,” Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, declared in an interview. “To get to negotiate a hemispheric trade agreement — some would say ‘I think it’s the biggest trade agreement in American history’ — so yeah, it’s pretty good.”
The more than 2,000-page agreement required more than two years of difficult talks with Mexico and Canada to complete. Much of it simply updates the original NAFTA, adding guidelines for food safety, e-commerce and online data flows. But it also contains a variety of changes to try to discourage the kind of outsourcing for which Mr. Trump and Democrats blame the original NAFTA.
That includes higher thresholds for how much of a car must be made in North America to qualify for zero tariffs. It rolls back a special system of arbitration for corporations that both Democrats and Republicans have criticized, and also includes provisions designed to help flag and prevent labor violations, especially in Mexico.
The swath of Democratic support was boosted by the endorsement of powerful labor voices, including the AFL-CIO — which has not endorsed a trade agreement in years — and the Teamsters in both the United States and Canada.
Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut and a prominent advocate for labor, penned a two-page letter to her colleagues outlining her motivation for support, deeming the final product to be one that “is not a model moving forward, but establishes important principles we can build from.” Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and one of Ms. Pelosi’s chosen Democratic negotiators, voted for a trade deal for the first time in more than two decades of tenure in Congress.
“On balance — it’s worthy of a yes,” Ms. Schakowsky said in an interview ahead of the vote. “I would never sign off on something that the unions said no to. That was a big deal.”
Mr. Lighthizer was on hand for the House vote, shaking hands and chatting with some of the lawmakers who were part of the Democratic negotiating group.
The implementing legislation for the trade pact will now head to the Senate, though Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has said he will wait to hold a vote until the conclusion of an impeachment trial. While Republicans in the upper chamber have chafed at being left out of the final wrangling over language, it is expected that the measure will pass and head to Mr. Trump’s desk.
“I don’t think the Senate should just quietly agree to be jammed in this process,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, acknowledging that his “irritation with the process” would likely not prompt him to vote against the deal.
Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who will vote for the USMCA, said Democrats were able to win strict labor standards by holding out their support until the Trump administration agreed in recent weeks to include them. He cast that as a victory for unions and for workers.
“The importance to this is that workers are not just at the table, but have real power,” Mr. Brown said, “which has never happened before in a trade deal.”
House Republicans, who have hammered their Democratic counterparts for not immediately rushing the agreement text to the floor after it was signed more than a year ago, mostly celebrated the agreement in speeches on the House floor, even though the deal now caters to what have traditionally been Democratic trade priorities.
There were some detractors over the final agreement negotiated by lawmakers: the PASS USMCA coalition, which represented a range of industries including pharmaceuticals, withdrew its support for the measure after months of lobbying. Leadership from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit public policy organization that advocates limited government, announced that the new agreement’s “trade-unrelated provisions and political giveaways set precedents that could harm future trade agreements for decades to come.”
Some labor unions, including the United Autoworkers and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, still withheld their support.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, a top union for food workers, also said it opposed the deal, arguing that it did not require strong country-of-origin labeling needed to strengthen food safety.
“Without strong country-of-origin labeling, consumers will be kept in the dark and America’s food workers will continue to face unfair competition from foreign companies not playing by the same rules,” said Marc Perrone, the union’s president, who acknowledged that some improvements had been made to the labor and enforcement provisions in the measure.
"House" - Google News
December 20, 2019 at 04:19AM
https://ift.tt/2Z6Jfax
Revised North American Trade Pact Passes House - The New York Times
"House" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2q5ay8k
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Revised North American Trade Pact Passes House - The New York Times"
Post a Comment