Virginia lawmakers are divided over the free trade agreements winding their way through Congress this summer – the debate over whether the deals will be good or bad for the commonwealth.
It's hard, if not impossible, to tell the true impact of trade agreements. Take NAFTA: The North American Free Trade Agreement. It passed in the nineties under President Clinton and since then millions of jobs have gone away, while millions of others have been added in say the technology sector. But Virginia Democrat Bobby Scott says a huge problem is packages like NAFTA are over sold by presidents in both parties.
“One of the problems is most of the promises in the past didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to and there was significant job loss in many areas.”
Now as federal policy makers are negotiating trade agreements with nations on the Pacific Rim, the impact of those past agreements has become the talk of the town in Washington. Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner is a vocal supporter of the administration's trade proposal, though he admits not everyone in Virginia is winning in the new and continuously evolving global economy.
“In the past a state that has seen both the upside and downside of trade, where we’ve had lost jobs in textiles and furniture in past trade agreements, sometimes we make a mistake between distinguishing between trade and those countries we have trade agreements. Those countries we have trade agreements - I believe with the exception of one - we actually have net surpluses. So trade agreements are actually quite good.”
Warner and the state's other US senator, Tim Kaine, are both former governors, so they've seen the evolution of the state's economy up close. Kaine, who supports the president's free trade proposal, says over all free trade deals have been good for Virginia.
“The Virginia of my lifetime was a Virginia that really went from an insular low income economy to an outward looking, aggressively global, high income economy and look trade has cost industries jobs and some parts of the state jobs, but on balance us being aggressively global and using resources like Dulles or the Port of Virginia has been good thing net for the state.”
Northern Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly is one of the administration's biggest cheerleaders on this Pacific trade deal. He says the Obama administration has learned from the mistakes of the past and isn't letting countries off the hook this time around on their promises to increase labor and environmental regulations.
“It actually has a pretty rigorous enforcement and adjudication mechanism, much more robust than past trade agreements, and don’t forget this goes back in and imposes that on past trade agreements, such as NAFTA.”
Connolly says the president can be trusted when it comes to enforcing US trade demands.
“And I think this president has a record of some credibility where he has actually brought some pretty strong action against trading partners, like China, and I give him a lot of credit for that because we sure didn’t see that in the previous administration.”
But Congressman Scott and most Democrats in Congress remain wary of trade deals. Scott argues some of the countries in the current agreement aren’t even enforcing current labor requirements.
“You have promises made on paper that just weren’t enforced and haven’t been enforced. And you have some of the people violating portions of this bill coming into the treaty that are in violation of present law that’s not being enforced.”
The skepticism coming from the president's left and right flanks seems to be making him sweat - or at least make a lot of phone calls to Capitol Hill these days. With his foreign policy legacy on the line, the president is doubling down as he attempts to cobble together enough votes to get his trade measure passed by the House this summer.
