Democrats and the TPP: Who Speaks for the Future?
(COMMON DREAMS) Robert Borosage, July 9, 2016 — Texas populist Jim Hightower will present the Democratic Party platform committee with a Bernie Sanders-sponsored amendment to the draft platform when it meets in Orlando this Friday and Saturday. It will read:
It is the policy of the Democratic Party that the Trans-Pacific Partnership should not get a vote in the lame duck session of Congress and beyond.
This should be a no-brainer. All of the Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination were opposed to the TPP trade deal, as of course is Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
The Clinton campaign has emphasized that there is “no daylight between Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton on TPP.” Were that true, the 187-member platform committee would pass the amendment unanimously. But in the drafting committee, the Clinton delegates and most of the Democratic National Committee delegates voted against similar language and instead forced through language that states only that “there are a diversity of views in the party” on the TPP and reaffirms that any trade deal “must protect workers and the environment.”
Say what? Democrats are a big tent. There is a “diversity of views” on many issues. That does not keep the party majority from taking a clear stand in the platform. The primary reason offered to mute opposition to the TPP was that the platform should not “embarrass” President Obama, who appears intent on forcing a vote on the TPP in the lame-duck session. But President Obama isn’t on the Democratic ticket, and many of the other policies of the platform diverge from his agenda. His apparent insistence that the platform remain neutral on the TPP will surely be used by Trump to prove that Clinton’s stated opposition is a lie. That will add to doubts already widespread given the support she and her husband gave to NAFTA and other trade accords, including initially the TPP itself.
The vote in Orlando will be a big, defining vote. Who speaks for the party? A lame-duck president pushing a trade deal that is opposed by both the presumptive nominee and her leading opponent, or the future nominee and the vast majority of Democratic primary voters and activists?