House approves
Fast Track
At 3:28 a.m. Saturday, with senior members of the Congress decrying the legislation before them as a "fraud" and a "hoax," the United States House of Representatives voted by a razor-thin margin of three votes to grant the Bush administration authority to secretly negotiate a sweeping Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement.
"This
night will be remembered as one of the largest surrenders of Constitutional
authority in American history," said U.S. Rep. David Bonior, D-Michigan, as the
House voted by a 215-212 to allow the president to engage in Fast Track
negotiations to create a North American Free Trade Agreement-style corporate
trading zone that would include virtually every country in the western
Hemisphere.
The 215 supporters of the bill included 190 Republicans and 25 Democrats; while
183 Democrats, 27 Republicans and two Independents opposed it. Seven members did
not participate in the vote.
Though organized labor has fought for years to block Fast Track legislation *
and passionately opposed this bill * several of the members who cast critical
votes in its favor were Democrats who had been elected with strong labor
support, including California's Susan Davis, Washington state's Richard Larsen
and Utah's Jim Matheson. The House vote was seen as the critical test for the
current bill, since an earlier version of Fast Track passed the House in
December by a one-vote margin. The Senate passed an alternative version of the
legislation this year by a wide margin. The differences in the House and Senate
bills required a Conference Committee headed by free-trade enthusiasts from both
parties * House Ways and Means Committee chair Bill Thomas, R-California, and
Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, D-Montana to craft a so-called
"compromise." With House consideration now done, the Senate is expected to pass
the compromise bill next week, clearing the way for President Bush to become the
first president in almost a decade to possess Fast Track authority.
Going into Saturday morning's vote in the House, both sides knew the
margin would be exceptionally close. This raised the intensity of the debate to
a level rarely seen in Congress.
A particular bone of contention was the fact that most members had not had time
to read the measure they were voting on.
The most important trade and economic vote by the current Congress came just
hours after members received emails telling them they could review the 304-page
bill on a Congressional web site. The House had to employ the so-called "Martial
Law" rule in order to waive the requirement that members get at least one day to
review legislation. Even members who often support free trade measures
complained that they were being asked to pass omnibus legislation without
sufficient consideration.
Rep. James McDermott, D Washington, bitterly accused the bill's chief House
sponsor, Ways and Means Committee Thomas, of hiding the legislation from members
until it was too late for a serious review of its contents. Rep. Robert Matsui,
D-California, a 12-term veteran of the House with many years experience on the
Ways and Means Committee, decried the fact that most members would vote on the
dramatic piece of legislation "sight
unseen."
However, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, who for two decades has battled the
corporate free-trade agenda with a consistency unrivaled in the Congress, told
the House the rush to judgment on the part of Fast Track supporters was no
surprise. Condemning the legislation as a move to make it easier to create
"corporate slums and global plantations with penny-wage jobs," Kaptur said:
"They want to (debate) it in the middle of the night while most people are
sleeping." And so they did.
The debate, which came after a day that saw President Bush take the
extraordinary step of personally coming to the Capitol to lobby for the
legislation, may have played out in the middle of the night. But it did not lack
for energy or passion.
"Fast Track essentially extends our current trade policies, and why in God's
name would anyone want to do that?" demanded Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont.
"When you have a bad policy, why would you want to extend it? Noting that the
United States now has a $346 billion trade deficit and that ten percent of the
nation's manufacturing base has eroded in the past four years, Sanders asked
supporters of the legislation: "When will you catch on? When all of our kids are
flipping hamburgers?" Georgia Republican Charles Norwood described the Fast
Track legislation was "the last nail in the coffin of America's textile
industries," while other foes detailed the damage expansion of the current
free-trade model would do to automotive, steel and agricultural industries in
the U.S. Other members noted that the legislation did not include protections
for workers who lose their jobs when a corporation closes a U.S. factory and
moves operations to China, that it creates a slush fund so that the
administration can pay trade-related fines without Congressional approval, and
that it removes the ability of Congress to defend protections for U.S. workers
and farmers. New York's Charles Rangel, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and
Means Committee, complained that the bill undermined even "minimum standards"
for defending the rights of workers and the environment. Fast Track critics
explained that, while the legislation was bad news for American workers and
farmers, it represented worse news for the people who live in developing
countries that could become U.S. trading partners in a Free Trade Area of the
Americas governed by corporate-dictated "trade promotion" rules as opposed to
democracy. Kaptur, who has traveled extensively to examine the impact of
unrestricted free trade schemes, explained that, under NAFTA, conditions for
Mexican workers and farmers had dramatically worsened. Rep. David Wu, D-Oregon,
bitterly criticized a
provision in the Fast Track bill that limits the ability of the U.S. to use the
threat of trade sanctions to promote human rights.
At every turn, Ways and Means Committee chair Thomas and a coterie of Fast Track
backers mocked concerns expressed by opponents, gleefully suggesting that they
were slow readers because they had not read the bill which weighed six pounds
when printed out in the several hours that it had been available to them. But
the supporters of the legislation did not choose to confront the most stinging
criticism to come from the opposition the charge that it represented a
capitulation by Congress to the very corporations that members are supposedly
cracking down on in the wake of the Enron, Global Crossing and WorldCom
scandals.
"This Fast Track shifts power from democratic governance to corporations,"
boomed Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who correctly described the legislation as
"corporate America's top priority."