South Korea Trade Agreement. On a single day – October 12, 2011 – both the House and Senate approved three separate trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. These measures are three more in a series of “free-trade agreements” intended to transfer the power to regulate trade (and eventually other powers too) to super-national arrangements via a step-by-step process. NAFTA is a prime example of such an arrangement. So is the developing continental government now known as the European Union, which is an outgrowth of a free-trade arrangement once called the Common Market. In fact, the Common Market-EU trajectory to regional governance served as a model for the formation of NAFTA.
The South Korea agreement, to quote Congressional Quarterly, is “considered the most economically important trade deal since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.” For this reason, the “Freedom Index” editors selected this vote over the other two (Colombia and Panama) for inclusion in this index.
The Senate passed H.R. 3080 on October 12, 2011 by a vote of 83 to 15 (Roll Call 161). We have assigned pluses to the nays because agreements such as this one are intended to transfer trade (and other) powers to super-national arrangements, despite the fact that under the Constitution only Congress has the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”
