In an otherwise heated intra-party debate, House Democrats playfully accused the White House’s leading trade negotiator of abusing cannabis before making “bullshit” arguments about trade.
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said Thursday that US Trade Representative Michael Froman, when talking to Democratic lawmakers about the administration’s agenda, is “baffling them with bullshit,” while Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) wondered aloud whether Froman was at least one toke over the line.
“Perhaps he has gotten access under DC’s new legalization law to some marijuana and he’s filling in gaps in his memory with confabulated facts,” DeFazio said.
An anonymous “US official” told The Hill that the commentary was “desperate,” and accused “hard-core trade opponents” of “cherry-picking their own data.”
What caused the public barb-swapping is a dispute over calculations and forecasts about trade surpluses. Defazio called the data “totally false,” and said that the US International Trade Commission showed the US having a $177.5 billion deficit in goods trading last year with free trade agreement partners. Pocan said that Froman must “be honest with us” if the administration wants to pass trade agreements it is negotiating. “Let us sit at the big people’s table,” he added.
Trade promotion authority, legislation the administration needs to approve of two major trade deals it is currently negotiating, is expected to advance through Congress as soon as April. Congress would, through the bill, relinquish its right to amend trade deals—a concession that is practically necessary for multilateral trade deals to gain approval.
But Democrats have complained that the deals—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)–are being negotiated in secret, despite their potential impact. Lawmakers are currently unable to review the working agreements–the so-called “bracketed text”–and the administration is determined to conduct the talks so secretly, that it is holding some briefings for lawmakers behind closed doors. Attendees of one such briefing with Froman and Labor Secretary Tom Perez were threatened with criminal prosecution for revealing information shared by the cabinet-level officials.
As The Sentinel has noted this week, public statements made by the likes of Froman and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have given the public an idea of how the TPP is going to be sold to skeptical congressional Democrats—through a refusal to recognize the intersection between certain issues like market access and regulation, while paying lip service to concerns progressives have had about past trade deals.
