Discovery Institute fellow: TPP is about more than trade

Most common-sense people rightly assume that reducing trade barriers is good in and of itself. But it’s a mistake to think the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) involving 11 countries plus the U.S. — that is close to being concluded after six plus years of negotiation under the Obama administration — is primarily a free-trade pact.

It’s also a misstep to grant the Obama administration with fast-track authority and the attendant secrecy on all details of this trade pact. The experience with Obama’s Affordable Care Act, his executive order on iImmigration, and his ongoing nuclear agreement negotiations with Iran remind us that the devil in the details once passed and implemented can be harmful and problematic to correct.

TPP has beneficial objectives such as opening up Japan’s highly restricted agricultural markets to more imports from the U.S. But as details of the trade pact get leaked, it’s becoming apparent that trade liberalization may be a small part of TPP. Much of the agreement’s language appears to be devoted to establishing global authoritarian decision-making on environmental, energy, labor, immigration and even intellectual property policy.

As for trade policy, TPP would give multinational corporations new powers that would circumvent American sovereignty and transfer the negotiation and implementation into the hands of stateless and faceless regulators and bureaucrats and away from congressional representatives and state legislators. Trade policy would then become more remote and opaque, with new legal impediments blocking American prerogatives in regulating and controlling U.S. markets.

President Obama’s executive orders have already stripped Congress from much of its authority over immigration, carbon emissions and the environment. Why help Obama further extend the transfer of power to supranational bodies and expand the Obama Doctrine — the tenets of which include the downsizing of America, leading from behind and engaging the world through international rather than American institutions?

Indeed it may be that Obama is pushing TPP under the guise of bipartisan trade expansion while being more intent on advancing the next steps of his very partisan political agenda. The agreement facilitates the implementation of environmental regulations — such as those dealing with so-called climate change — that would trump those established by U.S. lawmakers. TPP may also establish a regime with the power to override congressional actions imposing restrictions on the “free flow of labor” between the U.S. and Mexico.

In the past under previous presidents, fast-track trade negotiations and agreements might have made sense, particularly when a multitude of tariffs existed before the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995. But in the last two decades tariffs have been greatly reduced, leaving trade deals to focus more on global politics and power than on economic dysfunction.

President Obama has already largely overturned the U.S. constitutional system of checks and balances and dissipated much of America’s former power and prestige. Why the Republican-controlled Senate recently passed the fast-track provision to advance Obama’s secretive trade pact is an enigma. But now House members need to get out from under the illusion that TPP is primarily about expanding free trade. Above all, it’s time to reject the Obama Doctrine and stand for strengthening the sovereign institutions and laws of the United States and the interests of its citizens.