Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Thursday said that the US Trade Representative is currently working to enshrine “discriminary [sic] treatment of tobacco” in the Trans Pacific Partnership—a claim that runs counter to the myriad lawmakers and public interest groups who have said the TPP will undermine anti-smoking initiatives.
The senator from the tobacco-producing state leveled the charge on the floor of the Senate on Thursday in a speech that painted some of America’s most notorious corporate citizens as an oppressed class.
“It’s ironic that the idea of equal treatment and due process is being peddled with our trading partners as equal treatment and due process for everyone but some members of the minority,” he said, pleading with his colleagues for support.
“You may feel comfortable that this could never happen to you; to a sector in your state’s economy. But I believe you should be worried,” he added.
“Once we allow an entire sector to be treated unfairly in trade agreements, the question is ‘Who’s next?’” Tillis said.
Tillis did not lay out specifically what the discriminatory treatment would be, but suggested that it would involve shutting tobacco companies out of Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunals—controversial panels otherwise praised by the senator. Reuters reported last October that the USTR Michael Froman has “floated the idea of a carve-out for tobacco under ISDS.”
The freshman senator said that the TPP’s treatment of tobacco could threaten his support for the deal, and denied he was looking out for special interests in his state.
“I would offer this to anyone who believes my sticking up for tobacco, for equal treatment, and American values is shortsighted: I want you to know that I would do this for any commodity, any category, and any industry,” he said.
Liberal critics of the TPP have made arguments that run diametrically opposed to Tillis’ appeals.
In March, after Wikileaks published part of the draft TPP, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) alleged that “savvy, deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates could challenge a broad range of laws we pass at every level of government, such as made-in-America laws or anti-tobacco laws.”
In June, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said that the Obama administration “repeatedly” refused to tell him if “the damage big tobacco inflicts on children…[is] being addressed” by the USTR.
And just last week, a group of House Ways and Means Committee Democrats wrote to Froman expressing their concerns that public health initiatives, such as anti-smoking campaigns, could be presented with new legal challenges from corporate lawyers under the TPP.
“Tobacco is projected to kill one billion people globally this century unless countries take action to reduce the consumption of tobacco products,” the lawmakers said. “Thus, protecting the sovereign right of countries to adopt legitimate policies to reduce tobacco consumption from tobacco industry subversion in the TPP is critical to the health of the citizens of all of the TPP countries, including the United States.”
In laying out his argument and praising the idea of ISDS, Tillis alluded to a concept underpinning the body that could allow tobacco companies to lodge backdoor challenges to laws, when he noted ISDS panels enforce “minimum standards of treatment under international law.”
He also described ISDS as giving redress to “someone who believes their trade agreement rights have been violated by another government trading partner,” when in reality, the body will only be open to investors, as its name suggests.
In December, USTR Michael Froman said in a letter to Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) that the administration believes ISDS in past trade agreements have contained “abuses” and claimed, without offering much by way of specifics, that the TPP is being crafted to avoid replicating them.
Delegates hashing out the nearly-complete TPP are currently in Hawaii, discussing what remains to be litigated. Al-Jazeera noted Thursday that the US Chamber of Commerce “has sent representatives to most TPP negotiations, advocating for Big Tobacco’s interests while enabling the tobacco industry to remain largely silent on the TPP.”
