Fair Trade Dems to White House: Listen & Change, Or Watch NAFTA-Style Deals Die

Roll Call [1] has an update in the increasingly intense war of words between rank-and-file Democrats in Congress who ran and won promising fair trade reform, and White House officials who may force Congress to vote on the Bush-negotiated, NAFTA-style Panama Free Trade Agreement:

An increasingly agitated faction of Democrats is warning party leaders of ugly economic and political consequences if they try to move the Panama agreement.

Not only will it hurt the economy, critics say, but action on a Bush-negotiated trade deal endangers freshman Democrats in 2010 since many ran on a trade reform agenda. In addition, critics say, it doesn’t bode well for Obama to anger a bloc of Democrats early on when he needs their support for his ambitious domestic agenda.

“I’m getting really pissed off,” said House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D)...

Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine), co- chairman of the House Trade Working Group, singled out House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) in his criticism of his party leaders’ desire to advance the Panama deal.

“As a Democratic leader, I don’t think it’s helpful to vulnerable Members to ask them to support a Bush-negotiated trade deal,” Michaud said. “As a Democratic leader, [Hoyer] should not be encouraging the White House to move forward on this.”

Panama itself “is not a big deal,” said one aide to a House Democrat opposed to the agreement. “It’s an opportunity to re-evaluate our cookie-cutter trade deals and then use that as a framework...Panama sets the course for what future agreements look like.”

To ratchet up pressure, some of the most senior fair traders in the Democratic caucus are threatening to use their positions to block the trade pact from moving through the House. Specifically, "Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), one of the Members who attended the USTR meeting, said Slaughter repeatedly reminded USTR officials that she chairs the powerful Rules Committee" and that Slaughter "made it very clear that she didn’t intend to move any of those bills."

This is what the Make Him Do It Dynamic looks like in legislative practice - fair traders using their leverage to pass and stop bills in Congress to force the White House to respect President Obama's campaign promises. In this case, the administration is being forced to slowly but surely acknowledge - and potentially champion - fair traders' demands for major trade policy reforms, with the Panama trade deal serving as the first vehicle for such changes. As I noted before [2], such change moves at a glacial pace, but it is moving.