Divided Democrats make a stand on trade

Looking out from the sliver of Texas that he represents, running from San Antonio to Laredo and the Mexican border, Henry Cuellar has no doubt about where the economic opportunity lies.

"The world is getting more interconnected and 95 per cent of the global economy is outside our borders," the congressman says. And for the US economy, and Texas, that means that trade is becoming ever more important - and that supporting a massive Pacific Rim trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration says it is close to sealing, is a "no brainer".

What makes Mr Cuellar's view unusual is that he is a Democratic member of Congress who is prepared to offer his support out loud for a deal that the vast majority of his party's representatives in Washington stand ready to vote against.

The US Democratic party has had a difficult relationship with trade and trade agreements for decades. But Mr Cuellar and his fellow Democrats are now engaged in the biggest internal fight on the subject since Bill Clinton's 1993 battle to get his party's backing for the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

It is a fight that is pitting figures within the party such as President Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren, the de facto leader of the Democratic left, against each other. It is also filtering into the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, whom critics are pushing to take a firm stand against the TPP, which she, as secretary of state, once called the "gold standard" of trade agreements.

The debate is in many ways the same one the Democrats had over Nafta and have repeated in the years since as manufacturing jobs have moved overseas. But it has been intensified by a renewed concern over inequality and the state of the American middle class.

"This is not a new division in the Democratic party. What is new of course is the experience of wage and income stagnation over the past 15 years," says William Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton who is now at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

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With the support of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and a couple of dozen Democrats such as Mr Cuellar, administration officials and business groups are confident that the president is set to win at least the first round in the coming days.

That would mean securing the "fast-track" authority he needs from Congress to guarantee that what his administration negotiates will be subject to a simple up or down vote by the legislature and not renegotiated by its 535 members.

Later this year - and before presidential politics really heat up in 2016 - the administration wants to come back to Congress with a completed TPP to ratify in full. But if Mr Obama loses either of those battles it will be because of the opposition within his own party and a battle with its union base.

With the backing of Ms Warren, the Massachusetts senator and other progressives within the party, US labour unions are fighting hard against the administration over both votes, threatening to pull funding from any Democrat who supports either fast-track or, eventually, the TPP.

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, the largest union in the US, argues that it amounts to an existential fight for the Democratic party, which has long prided itself on being the defender of the American worker.

"If the president is successful in pushing this with a handful of Democrats and a barrelful of Republicans, in the end the Democratic party will be a minority party for a decade," Mr Trumka says.

The arguments for the push on trade are simple. The president and his supporters contend that the TPP is about opening up new markets for US exporters and thus creating jobs at home. It is also, they say, about reinforcing alliances with Japan and other Pacific economies and competing with China to set the future rules in the global economy.

"When people say that this trade deal is bad for working families, they don't know what they're talking about," Mr Obama told a group of supporters on Thursday. "I take that personally. My entire presidency has been about helping working families. The Chamber of Commerce didn't elect me twice - working folks did."

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There are signs that Democratic voters have a much more pro-trade view than union leaders would concede. A Gallup poll in March found that 61 per cent of Democratic voters considered foreign trade an "opportunity", up from just 36 per cent in 2008 and 38 per cent a decade ago.

Mr Galston attributes that changing view of trade in part to the evolving nature of Democratic support. The blue-collar workers of its traditional base have in many ways been replaced by higher-educated, tech-savvy workers more likely to be benefiting from globalisation, he says.

But the debate remains a raw one for the party.

"I have never seen an issue with such hyperbole, half-truths, demagoguery, [or] absolutism," says Mike Quigley, a democratic congressman from Chicago. "It's tough to deal with. It's an emotional issue. It's got baggage."

The divisive nature of the debate and the vigorous campaigns against both fast-track and the TPP by unions have left many supporters of the president within the party keeping quiet.

Ron Kind, the Wisconsin congressman who leads the more than 50 pro-trade "New Democrats" in the House of Representatives, says that, on either the vote to grant fast-track authority or on the TPP, he expects only as many Democrats as are needed to publicly support the bills. "There is a lot of support. But let's face it, there is a lot of political pressure as well," he says.

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