There are probably a wide range of reasons to object to Senator Jeff Sessions as President-elect Trump’s choice for Attorney-General. I’ll leave it to others to explain the concerns with Sessions in that role, but there is an issue with his understanding of trade agreements that I think is worth highlighting. Sessions has been repeating an objection to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that completely misunderstands the text of that agreement, and it is worth correcting the record.
The issue relates to the governance of the TPP. Sessions believes there will be a TPP Commission that acts as a supra-national governing entity and can override domestic laws. Here’s something he said last year:
Read the rest of this post →Among the TPP’s endless pages are rules for labor, environment, immigration and every aspect of global commerce – and a new international regulatory structure to promulgate, implement, and enforce these rules. This new structure is known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission – a Pacific Union – which meets, appoints unelected bureaucrats, adopts rules, and changes the agreement after adoption.
The text of the TPP confirms our fears, plainly asserting: ‘The Parties hereby establish a Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission which shall meet at the level of Ministers or senior officials, as mutually determined by the Parties,’ and that ‘the Commission shall’:
- ‘consider any matter relating to the implementation or operation of this Agreement’;
- ‘consider any proposal to amend or modify this Agreement’;
- ‘supervise the work of all committees and working groups established under this Agreement’;
- ‘merge or dissolve any subsidiary bodies established under this Agreement in order to improve the functioning of this Agreement’;
- ‘seek the advice of non-governmental persons or groups on any matter falling within the Commission’s functions’; and
- ‘take such other action as the Parties may agree’.
Further, the text explains that ‘the Commission shall take into account’:
- ‘the work of all committees, working groups and any other subsidiary bodies established under this Agreement’;
- ‘relevant developments in international fora’; and
- ‘input from non-governmental persons or groups of the Parties’.
This global governance authority is open-ended: ‘The Commission and any subsidiary body established under this Agreement may establish rules of procedures for the conduct of its work.’ It covers everything from the movement of foreign nationals: ‘No Party shall adopt or maintain…measures that impose limitations on the total number of natural persons that may be employed in a particular service sector… in the form of numerical quotas or the requirement of an economic needs test’; to climate regulation: ‘The Parties acknowledge that transition to a low emissions economy requires collective action.’
These 5,554 pages are like the Lilliputians binding down Gulliver. They will enmesh our great country, and economy, in a global commission where bureaucrats from Brunei have the same vote as the United States.
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At bottom, this is not a mere trade agreement. It bears the hallmarks of a nascent European Union. …