The Second “Compromise?”
By digby
After the foolish “compromise” on the Bush tax cuts, my guess is that trade will be the next demonstration of bipartisan comity. Howie wrote about this yesterday:
Now, remember, all those corporate Blue Dogs who were thrown out of office have been replaced by Republicans, not by better Democrats, and the progressives lost ground as well. So, the same way Clinton stepped up to the plate for Big Business as soon as he took over the White House and had Rahm Emanuel force enough Democrats to do what George H.W. Bush was unable to deliver– NAFTA– Obama and Boehner will be delighted to work together on more job-killing trade deals that Pelosi would never have allowed.
Trade is one of the few areas where the White House hopes, with some reason, to find agreement with resurgent Republicans. Obama is headed to South Korea for a G-20 meeting on Nov. 10-11, where he hopes to finalize the pact that was negotiated by the George W. Bush administration.
…The GOP has been pressing for the South Korea deal to move forward. Obama, who wants to burnish his business credentials ahead of his expected 2012 reelection bid, also has a strong interest in seeing the $70 billion trade deal approved.
If passed by Congress, the South Korea pact would be the largest U.S. trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement of the early 1990s with Canada and Mexico.
Of course, that’s if the new Tea Party overlords let it happen. Here’s Dave Johnson:
Tea Party members absolutely despise “free trade” agreements that have forced companies to close factories and ship jobs out of the country. They want to see “Made In America” in stores again. But the D.C. insiders, backed by big money from the big, monopolist, multinational corporations, insist on even more of these agreements. Which way will the Tea Party officeholders go?
More importantly, how much influence will their Big Money backers have over them now that they’ve been elected?
Obviously, if they try to push this through the lame duck the dynamics are slightly different, but if they do it in the next congress it’s going to be a very interesting experiment. You’ll see the emboldened Tea Party wing under DeMint flexing its muscles but you’ll also see a much more progressive Democratic caucus in the House. This is one of the rare cases in which you could theoretically see progressives and Tea Partiers join together (like the first TARP vote, before Obama and Boehner twisted arms to pass it.)
My personal instinct is to say that the tea partiers will fold under pressure, but I’m not entirely sure of that. They are looking for ways to distinguish themselves from the establishment and this may be their best shot. (And frankly, I think they’re mostly just wingnuts who are simply motivated by tribal hatred, so I don’t know how much this issue will matter to the them ultimately.)
We should keep our eye on this one though. It could be a harbinger of how things are going to work under the Teabag GOP.
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