Rosa DeLauro said she would love to tell us all the reasons she successfully led a charge to stop President Obama, at least for now, from negotiating a Pacific trade treaty. But if she were to tell us, she’d be breaking the law.
She has read details of the trade deal — behind closed doors.
“I can’t talk about parts of it,” she said. “Because it’s classified.”
After months of organizing opposition to the pact in the U.S. House of Representative, DeLauro, New Haven’s Congresswoman, claimed victory Friday when her colleagues voted to deny the president “fast-track authority” to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with 11 Pacific Rim nations (meaning Congress wouldn’t have the power to amend it).
In an interview Sunday after an appearance at a Newhallville corner-naming, DeLauro spoke of the “unprecedented circumstances” under which Congress members viewed details of the pact only at the last minute — and the public has been prevented from knowing the pact’s details at all.
The nations negotiating the treaty agreed to keep its details classified for four years, according to a document obtained and distributed by the group Wikileaks. The document’s cover page states that it “must be stored in a locked or secured building, room, or container.”
“Why didn’t [they] want the public to see it? I believe there are pieces in there, if they saw the light of day, we would have been opposed to it,” DeLauro said. (Click on the video at the top of the story to watch excerpts form the interview.)
DeLauro said that under the law governing classified information (Executive Order 13526) she is prevented from discussing even those details of the pact that have begun trickling out due to the efforts of Wikileaks and The New York Times, suggesting that the pact will limit people’s access to generic drugs and protect global corporations’ profits against environmental and public-health regulation. (According to leaked text from the pact, it is classified under 1.4(b) of the executive order, stating: “Information shall not be considered for classification unless its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security in accordance with section 1.2 of this order, and it pertains to one or more of the following: (b) foreign government information.)
“My job is to represent the people in my community and their jobs and their wages. … We have the constitutional responsibility to deal with trade agreements. We should have been able to see the entire agreement long before it was already complete,” DeLauro said.
She said the bottom line is that this proposed treaty, like its predecessor global trade pacts, did too little to protect American workers.
“We need trade agreements that recognize what the singular issue of this effort has been all about — that American workers deserve not to lose their jobs and they deserve to have increased wages. Our trade agreements in the last several years, including the recent one in Korea, have resulted in the loss of jobs, and particularly manufacturing jobs, and decrease wages,” DeLauro said.
The bill’s proponents — led by President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans — argue that the pact will create new jobs for Americans by boosting foreign trade. They claim that the pact contains many environmental and labor protections, and that failure to reach the pact will forfeit to China dominance in Asian trade.
DeLauro responded Sunday that the proposed pact fails to rein in foreign currency manipulation that already cedes dominance to China.
“We made suggestions as to how we could provide an opportunity for American workers not to lose their jobs and have their wages increase. Currency manipulation, which the administration said it would not include under any circumstances, has probably been responsible for one of five jobs lost in the United States,” DeLauro said. “China does it. And when the president talks about China, that we need to not have them rewrite the rules … if we’re serious about not having them write the rules, we need to have a currency chapter that penalizes those countries that manipulate their currency, sell their goods at a lower price, and undercut all of us.”
The bill’s proponents figured they could get House Democrats to vote in favor of fast-track authority by coupling the vote with a reauthorization of a pet Democratic cause — a global trade adjustment assistance bill that includes money to retrain American workers displaced by foreign trade. Democrats voted the combined package down anyway, figuring the assistance bill will be separately reauthorized.
Obama and Congressional Republican leaders plan to seek another vote this week to revive fast-track authority, and therefore the pact. DeLauro said her side will continue fighting.
“It’s day to day,” she said.