Thinking the Unthinkable: Could America Repeal NAFTA? [View All]

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/thinking-the-unthinkable_b_522195.html

Four congressmen have now moved a bill to repeal NAFTA. Superficially, this means little, as passage of this bill is unlikely in the near future. But more fundamentally, it means a lot, because, unbeknownst to most Americans inside and outside the Washington Beltway, free trade is inexorably losing its base of support on Capitol Hill.

This means, for a start, that President Obama's recent brave-faced pledge to move forward with his proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (interestingly, the dread phrase "free trade agreement" has been carefully left out of the name) is, quite likely, dead on arrival. Obama himself may know this, and may have staged this gesture simply to placate foreign nations and domestic corporate interests.

The lack of any change on trade issues in the Oval Office has distracted most Americans from the fact that in recent years, there has been an inexorable movement away from free trade in the House and Senate, driven by the public's relentlessly rising skepticism of free trade. For example, according to one analysis by Global Trade Watch, no fewer than seven Senate and 30 House seats flipped from pro- to anti-free trade in the 2006 election. Seventy-three percent of winning Democratic candidates in that election emphasized trade as an issue in their campaigns, while 72 percent of losing Democratic candidates did not. Not a single candidate of either party ran on free trade as a positive agenda, and not a single opponent of free trade was ousted by a free trader, in either the House or the Senate. Six anti-free-trade Democrats -- Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Jim Webb of Virginia, plus Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont -- captured seats formerly held by free traders.

This trend continued in 2008. Thirty-six new free-trade opponents were elected to the House: 13 in contests against incumbents, 20 in battles for open seats, and three in special elections. (Eight free-trade opponents lost, so the net gain was 28.) And seven new free-trade opponents were elected to the Senate: Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Udall of Colorado, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Tom Udall of New Mexico, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Al Franken of Minnesota. This is mainly, but not exclusively, a Democratic trend: the 2008 winners also included 10 Republican opponents of free trade who either held or won seats while campaigning against free trade.


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