Our goal - for the American people and U.S. businesses - is a TPP trade agreement that contributes to economic growth, sets high standards, and is sensitive to the needs of the developing and developed countries involved in the negotiations.
Unfortunately, the negotiations are not on the right track. In some areas we don’t know where USTR is headed and in others we don’t like where they are.
Before we turn over our Congressional leverage, I believe we need to ensure the negotiations are headed in the right direction. As I said yesterday, you can’t get a good deal if you are not seeking the right things.
The Hatch-Wyden-Ryan TPA does nothing to change the content of TPP. The negotiating objectives are too vague and often out of touch with where the negotiations currently stand.
We are putting forward a substitute today that will take a different approach. It will focus in on only TPP since that is the negotiation our Administration hopes to soon close.
Instead of vague negotiating objectives that only serve to suggest that the details of TPP don’t matter, our substitute would include specific negotiating instructions - I stress the word instructions - that the administration would have to follow.
Instead of enabling the administration itself to certify that it has met the negotiating objectives - which is what the Hatch-Wyden-Ryan bill does - our substitute would create an advisory body that would have sign off on whether the negotiating instructions had been adhered to.
Why does this matter? Because on issue after issue, our negotiators are either not asking for the right things or are not willing to share what they are asking for.
On currency manipulation, which has cost America’s middle class millions of jobs, we should ensure that the Trans-Pacific Partnership includes an obligation that our negotiating partners don’t manipulate their currencies, as Japan did in the 1990s and China has in the last decade.
The Democratic substitute does that.
On worker rights, we must not just include core labor standards in the TPP, we must ensure that countries like Vietnam and Mexico (as well as Malaysia and Brunei) bring their laws into those standards.
The Democratic substitute does that.
On the environment, we cannot simply list the seven multilateral environmental agreements from the May 10 Agreement, an approach that is both inconsistent with that taken in TPP and obsolete. Or fail to address whether or how climate change issues should be handled in TPP, an issue raised by other countries in the negotiations.
On investment, the negotiating objective cannot merely be the same as it was 12 years ago, before we experienced an exponential growth in concerns and a proliferation of cases.
And on autos, we cannot merely request that TPP “expand competitive market opportunities for exports of goods," without any guidance on how to truly open the historically closed Japanese automotive market.
The list goes on and on -- from rules of origin to agriculture to tobacco control measures to state-owned enterprises - with the Hatch-Wyden-Ryan bill falling fall short.
In every case, the Democratic substitute addresses those shortfalls.
Right now on so many unresolved issues our negotiators are not seeking the strongest outcome. It is the responsibility of Congress to ensure that they do.
