On Monday, Barack Obama signed the unconstitutional Trade Promotion Authority legislation. After failing to fully get through the House on a first attempt, Republicans snuck it back in the very next week under cover of the Charleston shooting and later helped to pass it in the Senate with a vote of 60-38. However, neither House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY would attend the signing of the legislation.
Obama claims that such legislation will “reinforce America’s leadership role in the world.”
If that is the case, then why was the Trade Adjustment Assistance? It’s because, to their credit, Democrats realized that this is going to cost Americans jobs and they wanted to unconstitutionally offer welfare from the federal government for those losses.
The Washington Times reports:
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President Obama signed hard-fought trade legislation Monday, thanking Republican leaders who helped get it done and saying the package will “reinforce America’s leadership role in the world.”
“I think it’s fair to say that getting these bills through Congress has not been easy,” Mr. Obama said as he signed the trade bills into law in the East Room. “They’ve been declared dead more than once.”
The two major pieces of legislation grant Mr. Obama “fast track” trade-promotion authority, which allows the president to negotiate a deal and submit it to Congress for an up-or-down vote without the chance for amendments, and expand aid for American workers who lose their jobs due to foreign competition. Members of both parties attended the bill-signing ceremony, although Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did not, with Congress on its Independence Day recess.
The trade-promotion authority measure is arguably the biggest legislative victory of the president’s second term, and will help Mr. Obama conclude negotiations with Japan and 10 other countries on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the centerpiece of his economic agenda. The House and Senate approved both measures last week after House Democrats, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, temporarily derailed the package.
Two weeks ago, Boehner and House Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) booted GOP Reps. Cynthia Lummis (WY), Steve Pearce (NM), and Trent Franks (AZ) from the whip team as retribution for their not going along with the establishment. Rep. Mark Meadows (NC) was also stripped of his chairmanship of the House Oversight Government Operations subcommittee.
In the Senate’s passing of TPA, even former supporter of TPA, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), wrote that he voted against cloture because of Washington corruption.
“The American people do not trust President Obama. And they do not trust Republican leadership in Congress,” Cruz wrote in an op-ed piece for Breitbart. “And the reason is simple: for far too long, politicians in Washington have not told the truth.”
Right, but was this a new revelation to Cruz? Did he not know this when he was in support of the unconstitutional delegation of authority by the Congress to the Executive Branch? One has to assume the answer is yes, and I’ll just say that most people don’t trust anyone in Washington, including Cruz.
Next up is the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty. However, as William F. Jasper points out, now that Obama has gotten what he wanted from the Republicans, he’s dropping the pretense about what he will do with that authority and now his handlers at the Council on Foreign Relations are looking to bring China into TPP.
Now that Congress has passed Trade Promotion Authority/Fast Track, the Council on Foreign Relations is taking the lead in calling for China to be included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This represents a key reversal of the deliberately deceptive public message put out by the Obama administration and the TPP lobby over the past couple of years, to wit, that a TPP is absolutely essential to averting Communist China’s economic hegemony, in the Pacific and globally.
The Los Angeles Times, which has offered unstinting support for the TPP, in a March 4, 2015 article entitled “China is Obama’s trump card in push for Pacific Rim trade pact,” noted the Obama White House strategy of presenting China’s economic ascendance as a primary reason for approving the TPP. “President Obama is hoping to win passage of a Pacific Rim trade pact by playing on fears of China,” ran the story’s subtitle.
“As the White House looks to wrap up years of negotiations on a highly contested Pacific Rim trade pact,” wrote the Times’ Don Lee, “administration officials are increasingly casting the agreement as vital to helping the U.S. face its most daunting economic rival: China.”
“The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, would be the largest trade deal in American history, involving the U.S., Japan and 10 other countries that combined make up 40% of the world economy,” the Times story continued. “China isn’t among them. In recent weeks, one Obama official after another has hammered away at the same line of argument: It’s crucial that Congress supports the TPP — including passing a related trade-promotion bill that would strengthen the president’s negotiating hand — because the alternative is that China, not the U.S., will write the rules of global trade.”
But, with TPA/Fast Track approved, the ObamaTrade lobby is dropping some of the pretense. As The New American has pointed out many times over the past few years (see here, here, and here), the architects of the TPP — especially the world government activists of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) — have long been on record in favor of the TPP as merely a “stepping stone” to a much larger Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) that would include China as a member. The anti-Beijing rhetoric is purely a ruse to lure support from conservatives concerned over China’s stepped-up militancy, as well as domestic manufacturers and labor unions worried about loss of more manufacturing business and jobs to the Beijing behemoth.
This is what happens when evil and compromised men are put in positions of power. Brace yourself America, this is about to get really rough.
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