The TPA, introduced as an amendment to an otherwise relatively innocuous bill about public safety employment withdrawals, would renew the on-again-off-again “fast track authority”that Congress has often awarded to the president over the past several decades.The essential features of TPA are: (1) Congress unconstitutionally delegates its constitutional authority “to regulate commerce with foreign nations” to the executive branch; and (2) Congress dramatically increases the probability of its approval of foreign trade agreements negotiated by the executive branch by restricting itself to voting up or down by simple majority on the agreements, with no ability to amend the agreements and with no possibility of filibusters in the Senate.So-called free-trade agreements that are negotiated under “fast track authority,” such as the already-existing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), have in common a structure and purpose to create supranational political entities that would supersede the national independence of the United States. Genuine free trade would mean the absence of government involvement, but these agreements entail more than just trade and put the United States on a trajectory to regional governance similar to Europe’s trajectory from the Common Market to the EU.
The House passed TPA on June 18,2015 by a vote of 218 to 208 (Roll Call374). We have assigned pluses to the nays because TPA would facilitate the subordination of the national independence of the United States to regional blocs of nations in a process that is leading toward a world government.
