Agreement or treaty?
That’s the question about the new trade pact between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. And if we get an answer to that one, the next one is this: Has The Donald reneged on his promise to Make America Great Again by supporting yet another globalist “free-trade” agreement that kills jobs and undermines American sovereignty by pushing the United States toward a North American union with Canada and Mexico?
If so, he’d better watch out. Entwining the United States in yet another of the Deep State’s complex, globalist webs might make him a one-term president.
Be that as it may, Trump didn’t negotiate the new pact. Deep-State globalists did.
The Latest
The latest concern about the 1809-page United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which has finally given Trump’s Deep-State and Democrat enemies something nice to say about him, isn’t just that it’s NAFTA and TPP on steroids.
Rather, the concern is whether it’s an agreement or a treaty. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) calls it a treaty, as Politico reported this week. On October 9, AMLO posted a poll on Twitter “to crowdsource ideas on how Mexicans should refer to the USMCA in Spanish.’” But AMLO is convinced that USMCA is indeed more than an “agreement,” Politico noted:
López Obrador proposes naming it TEUMECA, which translates to Treaty of the United States, Mexico and Canada, or T-MEC, which translates to Treaty of Mexico, United States and Canada. He added that Guajardo and Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray agree with him … [and] start with a ‘T’ for treaty in Spanish and be pronounceable in Spanish. Mexican officials, including chief NAFTA negotiator Kenneth Smith Ramos, have referred to it as AMEC with the A standing for agreement in Spanish, but López Obrador argued that it should be referred to as a treaty.
If it is, the President Trump can’t sign it because the Constitution constrains him from making treaties without the Senate’s imprimatur. Indeed, it’s one of his first duties in Article II, Section 2: “He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”
Anyway, AMLO thinks the agreement is a “treaty,” and at nearly 2,000 pages covering 34 chapters, it sure sounds like he’s right.
What It Does
Such is the putative treaty’s regulatory maze that it’s nearly impossible to comprehend. But one item is easily understood: the supremacy of such global bodies as the World Trade Organization, International Labor Organization, and the United Nations, via such conventions including the Law of Sea treaty, over U.S. trade policy.
As well, The New American reported earlier this month, USMCA creates a Free Trade Commission to govern 16 lesser committees that will manage agriculture, transportation, financial services, telecommunications, and intellectual property rights. And that commission can alter the agreement, including tariffs, without the consent Congress, which it cannot do, constitutionally speaking, even if the pact isn’t a treaty. Such authority still undermines the constitutional prerogative of Congress, in Article I, Section 8, “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”
Last, USMCA’s North American Competitiveness Committee will promote “further economic integration among the Parties and enhancing the competitiveness of North American exports.”
That globalist lingo pushing a North American Union ought to have provoked a raging Trump Tweetstorm, but alas, The Donald is shifting gears, it seems, on trade.
Who’s Behind It
Trump rode a wave of anti-free trade sentiment into the White House by ceaselessly criticizing trade deals that shafted the American worker. So how did he wind up with something worse than the jobs-busting NAFTA and TPP deals that Bill Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama, and their globalist pals foisted on us?
Easy: The same people who created those two disasters, as TNA reported, created this one.
The chief negotiator is U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations. And as Huffington Post observed, “at least half of the men and women standing behind Trump during his Rose Garden ceremony praising the new deal were the same career service staff who negotiated nearly identical provisions in TPP, which Trump had railed against.”
As a former Obama trade factotum said, it’s the “same [deal] with a new name.”
Photo of AMLO: AP Images
