WASHINGTON A sharp split in Congress will require President-Elect George W. Bush to deal with difficult labor and environmental issues to advance his trade agenda, U.S.
Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky said on Thursday "Any notion that these issues can be dispensed with ... is sorely mistaken," Barshefsky said in a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council. "We need, I would say to President-Elect Bush, a pragmatic approach." Bush, who has promised to aggressively pursue a hemispheric free trade pact stretching from Canada to the southernmost tip of Latin America, faces a busy trade calendar in 2001.
In Congress, there will be votes on an historic U.S.- Vietnam trade agreement, a free trade pact with Jordan and two proposed free trade pacts with Singapore and Chile.
During the election campaign, Bush said he would push for congressional approval of new "fast track" negotiating authority, which will be needed to conclude the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement and a broad new round of trade talks that the United States and other members of the World Trade Organization still hope to launch.
Barshefsky noted the newly elected Congress is "even more evenly divided" than in 1997, when President Bill Clinton withdrew his request for fast track authority to avoid an embarrassing defeat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
"We had a grand total of 40 Democrats willing to vote for it, and those 40 were very hard fought," she said.
Many Democrats, because of strong ties to labor and environmental groups, were unwilling to vote for fast track without provisions addressing those groups' concerns.
"This is a fault line between the two parties," Barshefsky said, noting that most Republicans oppose including special environmental and labor protections in trade agreements.
(Reuter)