Guest Opinion Journal of Commerce September 19, 1997 Who needs fast track? BY LORI WALLACH The Clinton administration's bill to establish a new grant of "fast track" trade authority constrains a president's ability to address environmental and labor issues until 2004. Given the Democratic congressional demand that the president require environmental and labor clauses in future trade pacts, the limitations in this proposal are a harsh slap in the Democrats' face. Yet the entire discussion about what is the best process for negotiation and ratification of future trade pacts is being lost in a battle over this series of retrograde modifications to the old fast-track language. This narrow debate misses the point. Fast track concerns how Congress will consider trade agreements, not whether the administration has authority to negotiate. The executive branch has such authority right now under its standing constitutional capacity. This authority has been granted in 10-year chunks since the 1934 Tariffs Act and was most recently extended via the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade's Uruguay Round, implementing legislation on into the next century. Indeed, as U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky brags so often, the Clinton administration has completed over 200 trade agreements in recent years. Fast track has been used only five times in its entire existence since 1974 and this administration has used it only twice. All the Japanese sectoral agreements and much-touted Multilateral Information Technology and Telecommunications Agreements have all been negotiated and implemented without fast-track procedures. The nearly completed, immensely complicated Multilateral Agreement on Investment, negotiated entirely during a period with no fast track, makes a mockery out of the claim that no country will negotiate to obtain market access to the world's largest consumer market unless fast track exists. Under fast track, Congress agrees in advance to no amendments, limited debate and a vote within 60 days of the administration's delivery of the legislation it writes. The closest thing to such extreme congressional constraints is the budget process, which guarantees a closed vote at the end, but provides Congress a role in writing the bill that will come to the floor. When fast track was hatched in 1973 by President Nixon, it was to facilitate congressional consideration of Tokyo Round changes in customs classification, a non-binding agreement on technical barriers and anti-dumping changes. Yet, today's international commercial pacts have expanded into issues like food safety, the size and weights of trucks on U.S. highways, how local tax dollars can be used and domestic banking and development law. The administration and the Republicans in Congress have settled on an early 1997 proposal which further limits fast-track coverage to labor and environmental matters that 1. are "directly related to" trade, and 2. that decrease market opportunities for U.S. exports. The language of the proposal is clever. It puts the words "environment" and "labor" into a fast-track bill. However, as the Congressional Research Service noted, it actually limits what labor and environmental issues could be covered in the current fast track. Indeed, even the ineffective environmental and labor Nafta side-agreements would not be covered under the "directly related to" language. This in part reveals why business interests opposed to the side pacts want the subtle stringencies of the "directly related to" language. The Clinton administration proposal also relegates to the WTO any future "review of the relationship of" trade to environment or labor. Yet last December, a WTO ministerial declaration announced that WTO would not deal with labor. The WTO's "environmental" working group has accomplished nothing for the past three years. Congress should delegate its exclusive constitutional authority for international commerce to the executive branch only through a trade negotiating authority that produces good trade agreements. Otherwise, Congress must accept political liability for bad ones. Lori Wallach is director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. Message created by ExpressIT! 2000 trial version. (c) 1996 Infinite Technologies - http://www.ihub.com/products/exp2000
