Obama’s chief allies in his vote-by-vote fight in the House of Representatives to win “fast-track authority” to negotiate this and other trade deals are Speaker John Boehner and Representative Paul Ryan—not his usual foxhole companions. The vote may come as soon as Friday. The House Republican leaders tell their dubious members that they are supporting Obama only in order to “constrain” him. Meanwhile, Obama is lobbying members of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose support he can normally count on, tirelessly and, for the most part, fruitlessly. “The president’s done everything except let me fly Air Force One,” Representative Cedric Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana, told the Christian Science Monitor this week. Nonetheless, Richmond said, “I’m leaning no.”
Some of the fear and loathing inspired by the T.P.P. is hard to take seriously. Conservative opponents of immigration reform, for instance, have descried in the T.P.P. a Trojan horse, inside which, they fear, the dreaded immigration reform will be smuggled into law. (Paul Ryan has tried to debunk this notion, calling it an “urban legend.”) There are House Republicans who seemingly refuse to support any measure that Obama wants, simply because he wants it. Last week, contemplating the approaching fast-track vote, Representative Ryan Zinke, of Montana, said, “We are talking about giving Barack Obama—a President who negotiates with rogue nations like Iran and Cuba—exorbitant authority to do what he thinks is best.” Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander, went on, “I don’t have faith that President Obama will negotiate in the best interest of Montana or America.”
More substantive objections to the T.P.P. have emerged from senators and representatives, who are now allowed, under strictly controlled conditions—in a guarded basement room under the Capitol, with no note-taking—to read drafts of the eight-hundred-page agreement. Senator Elizabeth Warren has criticized its provisions for “investor-state dispute settlement.” I.S.D.S. allows corporations to sue governments over laws that may adversely affect “expected future profits.” Environmental regulations, public-health measures, and even minimum-wage laws can be challenged under I.S.D.S., which is already a feature of many trade agreements. A Swedish power company is currently suing Germany, seeking $4.6 billion in damages, because of steps Germany is taking to phase out nuclear power, and Philip Morris is suing to prevent Uruguay and Australia from implementing policies to reduce smoking. Under the T.P.P., the international tribunals that would hear such cases would not, according to Warren, be staffed by judges but by a rotating cast of corporate lawyers. Challenges to American laws should at least be lodged, she argues, in American courts.
WikiLeaks has published T.P.P. draft chapters on investment, the environment, and two versions, from 2013 and 2014, of the intellectual-property-rights chapter. The environment chapter was a major disappointment to activists who had been led to believe that it would contain real enforcement mechanisms. In the Sierra Club’s analysis, the T.P.P. will generate a rapid increase in exports of American liquefied natural gas, which will in turn lead to more fracking, more methane emissions, a shift of the domestic energy market from gas toward coal, and the exacerbation of climate change. The proposed intellectual-property agreements appear to have been dictated by the entertainment, tech, and pharmaceutical industries. Doctors Without Borders declared that, if the drug-patent provisions do not change in the final draft, the T.P.P. is on track to become “the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines” in developing countries. With each glimpse of the draft chapters, the coalition opposing the agreement grows. Even a “sweetener” in the form of assistance for workers who lose their jobs because of trade agreements turns out to be partly financed by a seven-hundred-million-dollar raid on Medicare. Now Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, is trying to raise a hundred thousand dollars through crowdsourcing, planning to offer the money as a reward to anyone who leaks the entire T.P.P. text—twenty-nine chapters’ worth.
