Surely the Business Roundtable can do better than this. Or maybe not:
Top House Republicans believe the business community is blowing its chance to clinch a trade deal.
Unlike unions, they say, Big Business advocates aren’t flooding Capitol phone lines. They’re not winning over skeptical Republicans. And they haven’t made much headway with business-friendly Democrats who are considering voting for the package, either.
The issue is whether both the upper and lower chambers of Congress will grant President Obama Trade Promotion Authority ("Fast Track"). Passage of the TPA would allow the President to bring up the mammoth and secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement for an "up-or-down" vote by Congress without allowing any Amendments to it. The fight over TPA is
really a "proxy fight over ultimate approval of the TPP." Accordingly, passing TPA is an
essential precursor towards inflicting the sight-unseen TPP on the American people without leaving them any recourse to stop it:
Passage of TPA is seen by the administration as essential to securing an acceptable deal in the ongoing TPP talks, because the assumption is that the other countries participating in the negotiations will be hesitant to make their best offers if they think the U.S. Congress will be allowed to tinker with the deal after it has been struck by negotiators.
The Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce are pushing back indignantly against GOP criticism, claiming they've spent more than $1 million dollars on TV ads and even more on Internet and radio. But for some reason their money just isn't making much of an impression:
David Stewart, a top aide to Speaker John Boehner, voiced the frustration of Boehner’s office during a meeting Friday with officials from business lobby groups, telling them their effort is falling short. During the meeting at the offices of the Business Roundtable, Stewart said unions are outworking the business groups on calls to GOP lawmakers’ offices.
“The lobbying effort on the Hill has been abysmal,” one senior GOP aide said. “Calls and letters into member offices are running 10 to 1 against TPA. This is an uphill fight already given the lack of trust in the president and the general unpopularity of TPA, and the current lobbying effort has not made it any easier. If TPA passes in the House it will be despite the downtown coalition and the president, not because of them.”
Of course, if the Republican Party actually represented the interests of ordinary, run-of-the-mill American families rather than coddled Corporate CEO's making seven and eight-figure salaries, you might conclude that an opposition rate of 10 to 1 by their constituents would maybe suggest they might want to re-think this trade pact and the wisdom of relinquishing their Constitutional authority, rather than sending their leader to whine to the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce.
But wait, there's more!
Another GOP aide said the ratio of opposing calls to those in favor of the trade agreement is even more worrisome, 25 to 1 or worse.
My math skills are old and rusty, but assuming these staffers aren't simply lying what that means to me is that for every 10 people who care enough to call their Congressman and say the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a
swell idea, 250 people care enough to call and tell them it's a
horrible mistake. What that means is that CEO's of Monsanto and Nike and Glaxo Smith-Kline and Qualcomm can't muster up a few officers and directors to make a few calls poolside or from their corporate jets and at least create the appearance that this trade deal is something Americans want. It means they can't even cajole some lower-tier contract employees to sit in a sweaty conference room and astro-turf a few Congressman into pretending this is something that has any popular support at all.
The Politico article suggests that between 170-180 Republican House members are currently expected to support TPA, no matter how many calls they get from their constituents opposing it. The legislation needs about three dozen Democrats to pass.
No Democrat should vote for this. None. Zero. Nada.