Congress has passed the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015 known colloquially as “Fast Track” or trade promotion authority. The law allows the president to submit international trade agreements to Congress for an expedited, up-or-down vote without amendments. As expected, this has raised a chorus of voices from Chicken Littles complaining that the proverbial sky is falling. Specifically, they claim that:
- Barack Obama is a dictator.
- the USA has lost its sovereignty.
- it’s “an illegal, unconstitutional, secret treaty.”
These are all absurd claims. As per the Constitution of the United States, president Obama cannot pass any treaty, which is what a trade agreement is, without the consent of two-thirds of the US Senate. Granted, Fast Track requires congress to make an expedited, up-or-down vote on trade agreements without allowing them to make amendments. But these conditions prevent trade agreements from becoming mired in filibustering and pork-barreling. Congress can barely pass a domestic bill. Could you imagine if the president had to not only negotiate every trade agreement with foreign countries but also negotiate the terms with congress? If congress doesn’t like the terms of a trade agreement as it’s brought to them by the president, they can simply vote it down and it will not go into effect.
The claim that the USA has lost its sovereignty is perhaps the most absurd of all. Section 108 of the law, explicitly titled “Sovereignty,” states:
No provision of any trade agreement entered into … that is inconsistent with any law of the United States, any State of the United States, or any locality of the United States shall have effect.
No provision of any trade agreement entered into … shall prevent the United States, any State of the United States, or any locality of the United States from amending or modifying any law of the United States, that State, or that locality.
This conforms with existing law which makes any treaty found to be unconstitutional null and void. Furthermore, congress can repeal any treaty they previously ratified by simple legislative action.
Finally, I’ll dispel the claim that the president can make secret treaties. The trade promotion authority requires the president to “provide, at least 90 calendar days before initiating negotiations with a country, written notice to Congress of the President’s intention to enter into the negotiations with that country.” It also says that “the President, at least 60 days before the day on which the President enters into the agreement, publishes the text of the agreement on a publicly available Internet website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative.”
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