Mark Penn thought he could support the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement out of the right side of his mouth, while he opposed it out of the left. That controversy lost Mark Penn his firm’s contract with the Colombian government and his role with the Clinton campaign. Now it just may be metastasizing and moving up to Capitol Hill.

Congressional Democrats are getting hysterical over President Bush’s decision yesterday to send the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement up to the Hill for a vote. They claim that the president’s circumvention of protocol (not getting a final blessing from Congress first) now renders passage of the agreement virtually impossible.

The truth is that Congress was never going to give the administration an official green light and the president exercised the only real choice at his disposal.

But since when do Democrats cry for want of a successful trade agreement? I think there’s a little more to the story, which I address in this NRO oped today.

The long and short of it is that by sending the deal to Congress now, legislative intransigence before the November election is no longer an option. Democrats have 90 legislative days (until the end of September) to decide once and for all, in plain view of the electorate, the unions, the business community, and the international community, how they really feel about trade. The vote and the debate leading up to it could expose some deep fissures in the party, and could raise serious questions about America’s credibility and capacity to lead on matters of trade and economics.