Finally, on Fast Track: the main thing to understand is that UNTIL Nixon cooked up Fast Track, US trade negotiators were simply not authorized to set terms on non-tariff matters in trade negotiations. Fast Track allowed a form of “diplomatic legislating” with trade negotiators empowered to rewrite domestic laws on intellectual property, food and product standards, service sector regulation and more. The first chapter of TPP will include the same boilerplate found in WTO and past FTA: countries shall ensure the conformity of their laws, regulations and administrative procedures" with the attached chapters. All existing and future U.S. laws must conform to the non-tariff policy constraints set forth in the “trade” agreement. Failure to do subjects a country to trade sanctions - and in the FTAs and TPP (tho not WTO) attack in the investor tribunals.
Fast Track also allowed a president to sign and entering a “trade” agreement changing wide swaths of domestic non-trade policy before Congress voted with a guarantee that the agt and legislation to implement all changes to existing US law to conform it to the agt would get votes in the H and S w/in 90 says with no amendments allowed to the legislation or agt and only 20 hours debate max in either chamber. The WH got to write the implementing bill, with no committee amendments (no mark ups) and submit it directly for a vote. (This is the ONLY bill the WH can actually write.) All sorts of unrelated stuff gets super-glued in to try to get the votes to pass the agt. A veritable legislative laxative that is bad for the U.S. Constitution… GOP who like the corporate Trojan horse aspect of these agts often oppose Fast Track as trashing a key check and balance and giving the WH too much power. It took Bush two years to get a GOP House to pass Fast Track in 2002 by one vote…
Fast Track has only ever been used 16 times since Nixon sent the first bill establishing it to Congress in 73. Not surprisingly, since everyone woke up to the diplomatic legislating business, Fast Track has become unpopular on both sides of the aisle. It has only been in effect 5 of the 18 years (bush’s 2002-2007 Fast Track) since the WTO vote (which came after NAFTA) Clinton’s Fast Track ask was voted down on the H floor in 1998 - 171 Dem no and 71 GOP no.
And, just to counter the line from the folks saying Spocko got it all wrong on how domestic law gets stomped by these agts: some other low lights, besides the meat and poultry laws getting rewritten via “trade agt”
- WTO expanded the US patent term from 17 to 20 years - we consumer groups had stopped PhRMAs efforts to get this expansion from Congress, so they back-doored it in WTO
- WTO required a change to immigration law - we have to provide 65K H1b visas - as this was a U.S. commitment in the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services
- A waiver was implemented for Buy American procurement laws for all of the U.S. FTA partners and several dozen WTO countries
