60-37, Senate breaks filibuster on trade in big win for Obama, GOP leaders
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 23, 2015
Seriously, it was obvious last week that this bill was going to get past cloture in the Senate. You don’t waste a 218-208 vote – which requires arm-twisting and deal making – in the House, just to have it die in the Senate. It’s inefficient. Continue reading Told ya so: TPA bill passes cloture vote, 60-37.
This should be interesting.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is daring Senate Democrats to vote against fast-track trade legislation they supported less than a month ago.
The GOP leader has scheduled a procedural vote on fast-track for Tuesday, and is signaling he’s through offering concessions.
…especially since TAA (read: Big Labor subsidies) has been removed from the TPA (read: fast-track) Senate bill. If TPA goes through, TAA will be allegedly added to another bill later, and never mind that the House isn’t particularly interested in passing TAA if they don’t absolutely have to. And lo! – they don’t particularly have to, largely due to House Democrats’ decision to torpedo TAA earlier. Whether or not you actually want TPA to pass, surely we can all agree that it’s a bit of a pleasure to watch progressive Democrats sign off on burning down their own little darlings…
Moe Lane
PS: Even if you can’t, humor me on this. I’m typing this out with one eye closed (and the dominant one, at that): turned out that I really did have pinkeye…
That vote was pretty much what I expected:
The House narrowly passed Trade Promotion Authority Thursday — the first step of many to resurrect President Barack Obama’s trade agenda after his own party torpedoed a combined bill last week.
The chamber voted 218-208 on TPA, which will give him the latitude to negotiate a 12-nation Pacific trade deal sought by most Republicans and a small number of Democrats.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the Senate. Generally speaking, bare-majority votes like these are often a sign that there’s a deal already in place; and one of the more significant parts of the negotiation is over which Representatives will be allowed to vote in a manner not displeasing to their districts, and which Representatives will have to take one for the team. Since I can’t imagine the GOP House leadership going through this trouble just to watch the bill die in the Senate, that implies that there’s stuff afoot on the other half of Capitol Hill. Continue reading TPA stand-alone advances in the House.
Ah, the AFL-CIO:
Someone let the geniuses at the @AFLCIO know the text of the TPA bill is online http://t.co/n1H859CYhr
— patrickmgleason (@patrickmgleason) June 17, 2015
And they wonder why they have to force people to join their unions.
Politico has a reasonably good article up on Democrats’ self-imposed disarray on TPP/TPA: but because it’s Politico, they still have to be watched like hawks. Case in point is this passage…
For years, Pelosi was Obama’s legislative wizard. As speaker of the House after Obama took office, she ruled with an iron fist, muscling Obama’s health care bill through Congress, passing cap-and-trade legislation and Wall Street reform, and helping the president whip the votes for a massive stimulus package. It’s not a stretch to say that the biggest legislative achievements of the Obama era were a direct result of Pelosi’s efforts.
Cap-and-trade, of course, died in the House; and it, like everything else on that list, happened during a two year period at the very start of Obama’s administration. After that, of course, came the 2010 elections: since then, Nancy Pelosi has done nothing. It’s only been in the last year that her fundamental weakness has become visible. In fact, this entire event has been a graphic demonstration of how Nancy Pelosi functions when Harry Reid isn’t there to bury her mistakes. It turns out that she’s disorganized, incapable of making decisions quickly, and a bit rambling and unfocused these days. Continue reading Politico is being too kind about Nancy Pelosi’s anti-wealth incompetence.
Jake says it all, here:
Clinton takes a stand on trade – kind of http://t.co/31H10nbkul
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 15, 2015
Continue reading Hillary Clinton equivocates on free trade. …Of course she did.
Oh, my, but this is entertaining:
When it comes to the most significant free trade deal in decades, the Democratic party is leaderless.
That much was clear Friday after House Democrats sunk the precursor to a fast-track trade measure hours after huddling with President Obama, his chief of staff, and the labor secretary in the basement of the Capitol to discuss one of the administration’s top priorities this year.
Democrats wouldn’t follow Obama’s lead. But it’s also not clear they followed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in bringing down the measure known as Trade Adjustment Assistance. Though she announced at the last minute that she was voting against TAA, she personally negotiated the details of it with Speaker John Boehner.
Continue reading The Democrats certainly fornicated the canine on TPA/TAA today, huh?
Look, I understand that people have problems with TPA/TPP. Fine. I’m not here to change people’s minds; I make rhetorical weapons for other people to use. That’s what I am reasonably good at, and I let other people be the silver-tongued devils that go out and convert folks. However: please do not be stupid. And ‘stupid,’ in this context, very much includes ‘willing to let people manipulate your opinion without looking them up first.’
A leading voice against a pending Asian free trade agreement is tailoring his message to the country’s grassroots conservatives, but until recently he described himself as a progressive and worked for union-backed Democrats.
Curtis Ellis leads a group called the American Jobs Alliance that vehemently opposes the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and “fast-track” authority that would expedite its congressional consideration.
Which would suggest that Curtis Ellis thinks that you are an idiot. Yes, you. Are you laughing and calling it ‘Obamatrade,’ too? Yeah, let me quote what Curtis Ellis has written about you, specifically. Continue reading Progressive operative Curtis Ellis surfaces again as free-trade attacker.
(H/T: Instapundit) This bit from Roll Call on how Big Labor is simply… not answering calls from any Democrat is a good bit:
“We’re getting close to the end of the second quarter now … and now the answer they give us is, ‘Even if you vote no on TPA and no on TPP, you still may not get checks because we may be trying to take out people who did vote for it,’ ” said one House Democratic aide. “It’s not like they are going to reward good behavior. Now they’re saying, ‘We may have to take our money elsewhere.’ ”
But it’s not the funny bit. This is the funny bit:
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama will come to the aid of any Democrat who finds themselves in primary peril because of backlash for supporting the “fast-track” bill.
“Those who are concerned about it I think do take a lot of solace in knowing that they can count on the support of President Barack Obama in a Democratic primary if they need it,” Earnest said.
Continue reading Big Labor prepared to burn ALL Democrats, do you hear me?!? ALL OF THEM!!!!!!1!!!!
Well, this is interesting:
The Senate on Thursday voted to break a filibuster to advance legislation that would empower President Obama to complete a major, 12-nation Pacific trade accord, an integral step toward approval of a key piece of the president’s ambitious trade agenda.
The 62-38 vote to end debate on a carefully brokered deal to give the president trade promotion authority came in a dramatic moment, when Democratic senators secured a commitment from Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and majority leader, that the Senate will vote on an extension of authorization for the Export-Import Bank, which faces extinction June 30 without congressional action.
Continue reading Did Senate Democrats trade TPP/TPA for a meaningless Ex-Im vote? …Mayyybe?
