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Monday, 14 July 2008 03:50 |
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Reuters India
By Doug Palmer
Original Publish Date: July 10, 2008
Washington (Reuters) - A leading U.S. business group outlined a plan on Thursday to restore and revamp White House trade negotiating authority that was badly damaged in a fight between President George W. Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a free trade pact with Colombia.
The National Foreign Trade Council, whose members include Boeing, Caterpillar, General Electric, Microsoft and other major U.S. employers, "believes that this will be a major subject for debate in 2009," the group said in a summary of its proposed legislation.
The group's draft bill, which would need to be introduced by a member of Congress to have a chance at becoming law, would create a new congressional joint committee on trade with the power to block the White House from negotiating bilateral free trade deals such as those Bush has aggressively pursued.
The bill would renew "fast track" trade negotiating authority through 2013, with the possibility of one four-year extension. It would cover the current Doha round of world trade talks and three free trade pacts awaiting action in Congress.
Fast track, which has existed in one form or another since 1974, allows the White House to negotiate trade deals that it can submit to Congress to approve or not, but not alter, within a limited time frame.
Bush's fast track authority expired in 2007, and Democratic leaders in Congress have made no effort to renew it.
Many supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama are calling for a moratorium on new trade deals until what they view as problems with past ones such as the North American Free Trade Agreement are fixed.
Three pending free trade agreements, with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, are covered by the legislation since they were signed before fast track expired.
However, when Bush submitted the Colombia agreement to Congress this year against the advice of Democratic leaders, Pelosi pushed through a rule change in April allowing her to indefinitely delay action on the trade pact.
That blew a "gaping hole in U.S. trade policy for the foreseeable future" because other countries can no longer be sure Congress will vote on trade deals the White House negotiates, Fred Bergsten, president of the Institute for International Economics, said after the House move.
When Bush took office in January 2001, the White House had been without the authority since 1994 because of a sharp disagreement between Republicans and Democrats over how to handle labor and environmental provisions in trade pacts.
A Republican-controlled Congress approved trade promotion authority for Bush in 2002 after a bitter fight with Democrats. The bill increased the importance of labor and environmental protections in U.S. trade agreements, but most Democrats said it did not move far enough. (Editing by Jason Szep)
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