House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has an in teresting way of dealing with the po litically explosive – well, for Democrats, anyway – issue of free trade:
She cheats.
That’s precisely what House Democrats, at Pelosi’s insistence, did yesterday. In an unprecedented move, they changed the rules in the middle of the game – eliminating a longstanding rule that would have required them to vote within 60 days on the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
Never mind that the agreement is in the best interests of American consumers and those “working families” the Democrats pretend to represent.
The party’s Big Labor patrons – who provide crucial cash and campaign workers – said they wanted the agreement killed. And so it was – completing the Democrats’ abandonment of the party’s free-trade roots.
Naturally, Pelosi and her allies said the Bush administration gave them no alternative.
“You forgot to consult with us,” groused Ways and Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel. “You did not deal with some of the issues we have.”
Baloney.
Dealing with those issues is precisely what the White House has been doing in more than 250 negotiating sessions over the past 16 months.
Problem is, every time an issue got resolved, the Democrats came up with a new one.
Indeed, both the administration and the Colombian government made exceptional concessions to the Democrats’ demands for added protections for Colombian workers and the environment. And to the Dems’ insistence that the agreement be tied to economic aid for US workers.
As one US trade official reportedly described the Democrats’ attitude: “The candy store was open. They didn’t want to take it.”
The Dems’ final gripe was supposedly violence against Colombian trade unionists. But as a Cato Institute report notes, the number of such workers killed has dropped by 88 percent over the past five years – thanks to President Alvaro Uribe’s courageous decision to confront drug traffickers.
No, the real issue here is any free-trade agreement at all, no matter how advantageous to Americans and how helpful to US foreign-policy interests.
Big Labor said no – so Pelosi & Co. simply clicked their heels and snapped to attention.
In the process, chief US Trade Envoy Susan Schwab noted, Pelosi “upended decades of US trade policy and US trade law.”
The AFL-CIO, which yesterday hailed Pelosi’s action, claims that free trade costs American jobs. In fact, giving US firms free access to Colombia, which is what the agreement does, won’t cost jobs – on the contrary, it would create them.
Moreover, the Democrats have spurned America’s closest Latin American ally – the only one willing to stand up to the insidious Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
Embracing protectionism pleases the Democrats’ paymasters – but at what cost to the country’s long-term interests?
It’s shameful.