The Senate Committee on Finance declined this week to make equal pay between between men and women a trade negotiating priority for the administration at the same time that it moved to force foreign companies supporting a non-violent human rights campaign to register their position with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The moves came Wednesday night amid a frenzy of activity in the committee, as critics and supporters of the administration’s trade agenda pinned wish-list items to the must-pass “fast-track” Trade Promotion Authority—a bill required for Congress to advance ambitious wide-reaching multilateral deals currently being negotiated by the White House.
On Thursday, the House Committee on Ways and Means took up the same legislation and passed it with the widely-supported amendment, initially proposed by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), targeting the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) global campaign launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005.
While many amendments had been hotly debated, the virulently anti-Palestinian initiative passed the Senate committee with unanimous recorded support.
House Ways and Means Committee chair Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) passed the measure alongside another advanced Cardin proposal that, without irony, seeks to strengthen “the good governance and human rights negotiating objective” when the US makes trade proposals.
Predictably, the anti-BDS measure—one that seeks to shape negotiating policy objectives for US trade negotiators hammering out the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with EU counterparts–was excoriated by organizations that express solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation.
“From South Africa to the grape boycott to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) tactics have been essential tools used to create a more just society,” Jewish Voices for Peace said Thursday, in a statement blasting the Cardin amendment.
A number of provisions within the measure could also see business lobbyists wince and wade into territory they would otherwise, probably, prefer to avoid.
According to the modifications to the chairman’s mark—alterations to the the legislation that Senate Finance Committee chair Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) agreed before the hearing to advance—the provision would require foreign entities that issue stocks and bonds in the US “to report on discriminatory actions towards Israel” to the SEC.
It would also support a state government if it decided to probe a company’s relationship to the BDS movement “as part of its consideration in award grants and contracts” and calls for retaliatory statel-level boycotts against companies that back BDS.
Palestinians’ almost decade-old call on the world to boycott Israel—what Senators referred to on Wednesday evening as “economic warfare”–gained increased attention and support last summer, as the US-backed Israeli military slaughtered almost two thousand civilians trapped in the Israeli-controlled Gaza Strip, and permanently scarred, either physically or psychologically, hundreds of thousands more. In the same time-frame, rocket-fire from Gaza so vociferously protested by officials in Washington killed seven civilians within Israel—one, a Thai national, and another, an Arab from a Bedouin community that has complained of the Israeli government’s refusal to allow them to build bomb shelters.
During and in the aftermath of the heavily one-sided conflict, some European pension funds and companies ceased engaging in certain types of commercial activity with Israeli counterparts or multinationals profiting off of the occupation of the West Bank. A number of European retailers, including the British retailing giant Tesco, have announced they won’t supply some goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements or by outfits that are based, in part, in the highly-discriminatory communities.
Churches and universities in the US and high-ranking officials in Latin American countries have also voiced some support for BDS.
In addition to commercial consequences and the grief the legislation will cause European activists and trade negotiators, the Cardin amendment could also give a number of civil liberties advocates in the US some cause for concern. Included in the bill, according to the chairman’s mark-up, is another measure that “requires the President to report to Congress on politically motivated acts of boycott, divestment from, and sanctions against Israel”–a provision that could set up the stage for some controversial investigations into Americans’ political beliefs.
Also included in the amendment is language that would seemingly strain to give legal cover abroad to any American commercially involved with Israeli settlements or settlement expansion—although both are legally suspect in many jurisdictions, and the latter is used in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.” The legislation instructs American judges to ignore “any judgment entered by a foreign court against a US person carrying out business operations in Israel, or in any territory controlled by Israel” when that ruling finds “that the location in Israel, or in any territory controlled by Israel…is sufficient to constitute a violation of law.”
Throughout the marathon Senate mark-up hearing, which hacked through 213 pages of amendments–more than a third came from the office of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)–only one other tacked-on proposal passed through a unanimous recorded vote, and it wasn’t attached to the TPA bill.
It was a measure, added to another regular trade reauthorization bill, on engaging trading partners on foreign exchange rates, proposed by a trio of Democratic senators and Hatch.
As alluded to before, although the committee had time to rail against peaceful activists wishing Palestinians were considered more than sub-human by their occupiers, it, fittingly, did not have time to promote gender equality. A TPA-related amendment proposed by Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Brown that would promote “equal renumeration as a core labor standard” fell by a 10-16 vote. Ranking member Wyden and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) joined Republicans in shooting it down.
Notably, an amendment proposed by Sens. Stabenow and Portman with strong bipartisan support that would have forced trade negotiators to address currency manipulation also fell by a 11-15 vote. Hatch confirmed with administration witnesses present that the White House considered the measure a “poison pill” that would have effectively caused Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiators to go back to the drawing boards.
While Hatch had been urging his colleagues to refrain from weighing down the carefully-negotiated TPA bill, the Cardin amendment on bolstering “the good governance and human rights negotiating objective” passed by voice vote. A proposal from Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) that would exclude countries where human trafficking is relatively widespread from qualifying for fast-track negotiations also passed 16-10.
In a bit of drama, when the House Committee on Ways and Means took up TPA, it refrained from adding on Menendez’s proposal.
With Malaysia considered a “Tier 3” country in last year’s State Department Trafficking in Persons report, the legislation could upset ongoing TPP negotiations.
And in another bit of theater, Ryan also refused on procedural grounds to allow the committee’s ranking member and a pro-labor critic of the administration’s trade agenda from bringing up his alternative TPA proposal.
“What’s happening here is trying to use a point of process against major policy, that is a major mistake,” Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) said afterward.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a supporter of Levin’s counter proposal, also bemoaned Ryan’s move, perhaps slightly increasing the odds that fast-track will eventually die on the floor of the House. The Hill reported on April 14 that the chamber is roughly 35 Democrats short of passing TPA, but Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said this week he believes “we do have the votes” to pass the key bill.
Sessions’ seniors, however, don’t appear as sanguine.
“This bill has strong support from House Republicans,” House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday. “We’ll do our part, but the president must do his part, as well.”
