President Obama will not have a chance to finalize the approval of his signature trade initiative, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Thursday that he will not bring up the controversial agreement for consideration this year.
“But it will still be around. It can be massaged, changed, worked on during the next administration. So, I hope America will stay in the trade business,” McConnell said, according to Reuters.
At a breakfast event in Kentucky, McConnell mentioned his staunch support of the deal. He noted that it was awkward for him, personally, to be united with the White House last year, in the successful bid to pass a prerequisite to the TPP.
“I was aligned with Barack Obama against [Sen.] Harry Reid [D-Nev.] and [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.],” he said, according to The Hill. “Almost an out-of-body experience, now that I think about it.”
That passage, however, was slim, and the TPP has become even more politically-poisonous in the wake of the presidential primaries.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) received a boost from the electorate during his insurgent campaign, in part, because of his longstanding opposition to multilateral trade deals.
And Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton came out against the TPP in October, faced with a challenge from Sanders, though she had touted the TPP as President Obama’s Secretary of State.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump criticized trade deals to great effect, in his unexpected rise to the nomination. He was virtually the only Republican critic of multilateral trade agreements during the party’s contest.
Critics say the agreements have seen jobs move from the US, to jurisdictions with lax labor laws and environmental protections.
Progressives, in particular, bemoan the fact that they appear to suppress wages around the world; in the so-called “Race to the Bottom.”
Backing this up, for example, was a Tufts University study that predicted the TPP will have a net negative impact on workers in all signatory nations. The researchers said that the agreement will lead to an aggregate of 771,000 job losses over the next decade, in all parties to the deal.
“[B]usinesses in participating countries would strive to become more competitive by cutting labor costs, thereby seeking higher short-term profits while undermining efficiency and productivity in the long-term,” the study said.
President Obama has unconvincingly tried to sell the TPP to the left as new kind of trade deal; one that incorporates criticism of past agreements.
“President Obama has repeatedly stated that the TPP is ‘the most progressive trade bill in history’ because it has high labor, environmental, and human rights standards,” the staff of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) noted, in a report published last year. “But proponents of almost every free trade agreement (FTA) in the last 20 years have made virtually identical claims.”
