John Murphy
is the Senior Vice President for International Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As mentioned, he was the last of the three private sector speakers at GBD’s July 24 event on North American trade. He began by saying he was going to try to do three things: 1) recap the case for USMCA, 2) highlight some reasons for optimism, and 3) discuss what has to happen for USMCA to become law. We’ll share a bit from each of those segments but in reverse order.
As a practical matter, the question of what has to happen means, what has to happen for the agreement and its implementing legislation to be approved by the House of Representatives. The Senate seems ready to approve the bill, so that is not an issue. And it is President Trump’s agreement. It’s safe to assume that, if a bill implementing the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement reaches his desk, he will sign it.
First and foremost, getting the House to approve such a bill means first and foremost getting the bill to the floor where it can be debated and voted upon. That’s where the deal Mr. Murphy is talking about comes into play. Here is the paragraph with today’s featured quote:
“What has to happen to have a successful vote on USMCA? We need some kind of a deal between Speaker Pelosi and the working group of House Democrats that she has appointed with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. And you’ve all seen the comments from both sides. There is mutual respect. There is a sense that the gaps are bridgeable. The list of issue areas that they are discussing is finite. And this can be done. These gaps can be bridged.”
It isn’t just comedians who live by the adage “timing is everything.” So do politicians. And if there is a bipartisan agreement on anything, it is that Congress will not want to take up USMCA in 2020, an election year. It has to be done between the end of the summer recess in September and the close of the 2019 session in December. On paper, it would appear that the Trump administration can force the issue when it wishes under the terms of the fast-track legislation for trade agreements, The Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015. But (almost) no one believes that. As Mr. Murphy explained:
“Y
ou can’t jam Congress.
Congress has the lead on trade under our Constitutional system, Article I, Section 8. We saw in 2008 with the U.S.-Colombia trade promotion agreement, an administration sent a trade agreement to Congress under TPA, seeking to push a reluctant House, a resisting House, into holding a vote. That vote was not held. There is no way to jam Congress on this. There is no rebellion strategy. Even if somehow you could contrive that this vote would happen in the House of Representatives, many of the House Democrats who are positively inclined and want to find a way to vote for USMCA, they have been quite explicit with us. You’re not going to peel off some doughty band of rebels who will approach the issue and defy House leadership on this.
“
We need a deal
. The only way to get through this is to do this the old school way. The parties have to do what they are doing: get together, work together, strike compromises. And, in doing so, we’re confident in the business community that we can get this last mile of the journey behind us and find a path to seeing approval of this trade agreement. So, thank you very much.”
As for the goods news,
John Murphy cited a number of bases for optimism, from the way Speaker Pelosi is handling the issue to the fact that Congress has gotten some major pieces of legislation like the debt ceiling out of the way, thus clearing the decks for action on USMCA when the time is right. The biggest piece of goods news is that a number of Democrats seems to be prepared to vote for it. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce leads the USMCA Coalition. It’s big. Coalition members have had more than 1,000 meetings with members of Congress, and those meetings, including the meetings with Democratic members, have been encouraging. As Mr. Murphy put it,
“The number of [Democratic] Members of the House who are open minded on [USMCA] — it’s larger than you might think.”
The Case for USMCA.
Mr. Murphy was almost apologetic in presenting the arguments for USCMA – not because they are not true and important but because he assumed the audience had heard them many times before. He quoted
Scott Miller,
now with CSIS but for years the Washington voice of Procter and Gamble on trade. “You don’t make a Tide commercial and run it once,” Mr. Miller had said. Mr. Murphy’s Tide commercial for USMCA was this:
“Preserve and strengthen; preserve and strengthen. It will preserve and strengthen our trade with Canada and Mexico, by far our most important trading partners. This commerce supports 12 million American jobs. For manufacturers, U.S. exports to these two countries exceed our exports of manufactured goods to the next 11 countries on the list combined. They are that important to the U.S. economy. One third of U.S. agricultural exports go to these two countries.”
That language, by the way, is almost identical – we suspect purposely so – with the language of the letter that the USMCA Coalition sent to all members of Congress on July 23. There were 600 signatories to that letter, representing every state of the Union and every sector of the economy.
