Who needs fast track? by Lori Wallach

[MDOLAN <mdolan@citizen.org>]

  >Guest Opinion
  >Journal of Commerce
  >September 19, 1997
  >
  >Who needs fast track?
  >
  >BY LORI WALLACH
  >
  >The Clinton administration's bill to establish a new grant of
  >"fast track" trade authority constrains a president's ability to
  >address environmental and labor issues until 2004.
  >
  >Given the Democratic congressional demand that the
  >president require environmental and labor clauses in future
  >trade pacts, the limitations in this proposal are a harsh slap
  >in the Democrats' face.
  >
  >Yet the entire discussion about what is the best process for
  >negotiation and ratification of future trade pacts is being
  >lost in a battle over this series of retrograde modifications
  >to the old fast-track language. This narrow debate misses
  >the point. Fast track concerns how Congress will consider
  >trade agreements, not whether the administration has
  >authority to negotiate. The executive branch has such
  >authority right now under its standing constitutional
  >capacity. This authority has been granted in 10-year
  >chunks since the 1934 Tariffs Act and was most recently
  >extended via the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and
  >Trade's Uruguay Round, implementing legislation on into
  >the next century.
  >
  >Indeed, as U.S. Trade Representative Charlene
  >Barshefsky brags so often, the Clinton administration has
  >completed over 200 trade agreements in recent years. Fast
  >track has been used only five times in its entire existence
  >since 1974 and this administration has used it only twice.
  >All the Japanese sectoral agreements and much-touted
  >Multilateral Information Technology and
  >Telecommunications Agreements have all been negotiated
  >and implemented without fast-track procedures. The nearly
  >completed, immensely complicated Multilateral Agreement
  >on Investment, negotiated entirely during a period with no
  >fast track, makes a mockery out of the claim that no
  >country will negotiate to obtain market access to the
  >world's largest consumer market unless fast track exists.
  >
  >Under fast track, Congress agrees in advance to no
  >amendments, limited debate and a vote within 60 days of
  >the administration's delivery of the legislation it writes. The
  >closest thing to such extreme congressional constraints is
  >the budget process, which guarantees a closed vote at the
  >end, but provides Congress a role in writing the bill that will
  >come to the floor.
  >
  >When fast track was hatched in 1973 by President Nixon,
  >it was to facilitate congressional consideration of Tokyo
  >Round changes in customs classification, a non-binding
  >agreement on technical barriers and anti-dumping changes.
  >
  >Yet, today's international commercial pacts have expanded
  >into issues like food safety, the size and weights of trucks
  >on U.S. highways, how local tax dollars can be used and
  >domestic banking and development law.
  >
  >The administration and the Republicans in Congress have
  >settled on an early 1997 proposal which further limits
  >fast-track coverage to labor and environmental matters that
  >1. are "directly related to" trade, and 2. that decrease
  >market opportunities for U.S. exports.
  >
  >The language of the proposal is clever. It puts the words
  >"environment" and "labor" into a fast-track bill. However,
  >as the Congressional Research Service noted, it actually
  >limits what labor and environmental issues could be
  >covered in the current fast track.
  >
  >Indeed, even the ineffective environmental and labor Nafta
  >side-agreements would not be covered under the "directly
  >related to" language. This in part reveals why business
  >interests opposed to the side pacts want the subtle
  >stringencies of the "directly related to" language.
  >
  >The Clinton administration proposal also relegates to the
  >WTO any future "review of the relationship of" trade to
  >environment or labor. Yet last December, a WTO
  >ministerial declaration announced that WTO would not
  >deal with labor. The WTO's "environmental" working
  >group has accomplished nothing for the past three years.
  >
  >Congress should delegate its exclusive constitutional
  >authority for international commerce to the executive
  >branch only through a trade negotiating authority that
  >produces good trade agreements. Otherwise, Congress
  >must accept political liability for bad ones.
  >
  >Lori Wallach is director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.
  ===== Comments by MDOLAN@CITIZEN (MDOLAN) at 9/19/97 12:21 pm
  ... and my boss.
  /s/ 
  
  
  
  ****************************************************************************
   /s/ Mike Dolan, Field Director, Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen
  
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