Pelosi and Reid at odds with Obama over trade

The White House and Democratic leaders in Congress are at odds over three pending trade deals that President Obama is poised to send to Capitol Hill.

Throughout the summer, Obama has been making the case that the trade accords with Colombia, South Korea and Panama will help the ailing economy by creating jobs. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) disagree.

The politically awkward situation comes at a time when the nation's unemployment rate is 9.1 percent and Republicans and Democrats are jockeying for position on job creation.

Reid has vowed to vote against all three deals when they arrive on the Senate floor, possibly as early as next month.

"I am not a big fan of free-trade agreements," Reid said on the Senate floor in June. "My voting record is in accordance with that."

Reid has a long track record of voting against free trade deals, including no votes on the U.S. agreements with Chile and Singapore in 2003, the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States-Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005, Oman in 2006 and Peru in 2007.

"I think if you asked people in Nevada: Boy, hasn't NAFTA helped us a lot, they would just sneer and walk away," he said in his floor speech. "We keep talking about free-trade agreements, but where is the fair part of those trade agreements? Shouldn't we be more worried about our American workers than workers in other places? I think that certainly is the case."

He even chastised Republicans for being "more concerned about what jobs are being created in Colombia or Panama or Korea than what jobs are being created here in America."

Reid, a strong supporter of organized labor, lines up with the views of the AFL-CIO, which has said that similar trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) cost nearly 700,000 jobs and created a $97 billion trade deficit with Mexico.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has said the largest of the three trade pacts, with South Korea, will cost the U.S. 159,000 jobs. The deal with Colombia will cost 54,000 jobs, he said.

Pelosi, too, has added her skepticism about the number of jobs that could be created by the trade deals.
“The White House may support it, but the Congress may have a different view,” Pelosi said last month.

Pelosi called it "debatable” that the trade deals would have created jobs if passed when President George W. Bush pressed Congress to take them up several years ago.

In 2008, Pelosi torpedoed fast-track authority for the Colombia agreement and that was the last lawmakers have seen of the agreements.

The California Democrat, who supported trade deals with Peru, Singapore and Chile but opposed CAFTA, hasn't said outright that she would vote against the three deals. Instead, she has shifted her attention to what she considers higher-priority job-creation measures -- more funding for infrastructure and a China currency bill, both of which she has said "would keep American workers on our shores."

Last month, in a speech to the United Steelworkers, Pelosi said China's currency manipulation must be addressed before sending the trade deals up to Capitol Hill: "If you want to bring those trade agreements to the floor of Congress you better be prepared first to let us bring our bill on China's manipulation of its currency, which is unfair to America's workers."

Reid last Tuesday also addressed the currency issue: "The first major jobs bill we're going to have is send a message to the Chinese, where we've lost 2.8 million jobs during the last eight years, and that is we're going to do something about Chinese currency. And we're going to do that quickly."

Meanwhile, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) strongly support the pending trade deals, though they have expressed their frustration that the White House has not yet sent them to Congress.

Reid's and Pelosi's stances echo Obama in 2008. At that time, he said he would stand firm in his opposition to the Colombia FTA “because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”

That's exactly why many Democrats oppose the deals, especially with Colombia, where they argue violence is continuing against workers and the U.S. needs to add tougher requirements into the agreement to ensure protections.

Democrats have joined together on passage of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a program that retrains workers displaced by foreign trade, which Reid has said "is important to hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their work because of these jobs being shipped overseas."

The president pushed for and made changes to all three agreements -- less than what he proposed during his 2008 run -- but that hasn't quelled concerns from rank-and-file Democrats over passage of the deals.

Even Obama’s push to renew the worker-assistance program hasn't diminished the opposition from some Democrats and organized labor who have deemed the trade deals "job killers."

While Republicans press for completion of the Bush-era, Obama-tweaked trade deals, Democrats along with some of their GOP colleagues are pressing for passage in October of a bill that would crack down on China's undervalued currency -- a move opposed by the White House.

Regardless of his opposition, Reid has vowed to push through the trade agreements as part of an agreement to pass TAA.

"As most everyone knows here, I don't like them. I don't like any of the three of them, but they have a lot of support over here -- quite a bit of support Democrats, and I think overwhelming support by Republicans," Reid said last week. "So that's how I intend to move forward on those."

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