Road To Fast-Track Trading Is Slowed By Quest For Consensus

President Clinton’s trade allies in Congress have been pressing him for months to deliver in writing the legislation he wants passed this year to give him unfettered authority to negotiate trade deals.

Not quite yet. It’s still wait, and then hurry up.

For all the rhetoric on an issue debated for more than two years, the specific terms aren’t ready yet. What Clinton seeks is clear: a new lease on the fast-track trade negotiating authority that expired in 1993. That would allow the administration to make trade agreements and put them to Congress as yes-or-no propositions, no amendments permitted.

How Clinton gets there is unclear. There won’t be a detailed proposal before next week, a symptom of the political stresses at work on the issue.

At a White House send-off Wednesday, Clinton made fast-track approval sound like the next thing to patriotism. “If we want to spread prosperity and open trade to support peace and democracy and freedom and free markets, we must do this,” the president said.

Congressional Republicans stayed away to protest the lack of a bill.

This is traditionally a Republican cause; labor and liberal Democrats always have been at least skeptical about the impact of trade agreements on jobs at home.

“There’s nothing complicated here,” Gene Sperling, director of the president’s National Economic Council, said of the delay, calling it a matter of a few more days for consultation.

But there are political complexities.

Clinton can’t win without a solid Republican majority in Congress to offset opposition among Democrats. So he has to balance Democratic demands that the bill include provisions on labor standards and environmental protection by U.S. trading partners against GOP insistence on terms that don’t tie strings to trade.

That’s nothing new; the lines were drawn long ago.

“Trade issues have always been hot-button issues for organized labor,” said Secretary of Commerce William Daley, who had to tackle that political problem when he was chief lobbyist for Clinton in winning approval of NAFTA, the free trade deal with Mexico, in 1993.

That agreement has not been the trade bonanza advertised at the time, an added burden for the administration now. Labor argues that it has been a job drain, to low-paying Mexican manufacturers. The administration counters that it has had a positive, but modest economic impact.

This trade debate is over umbrella authority to cover future trade agreements. Clinton sought it unsuccessfully in 1995 and shelved it as too sensitive for campaign-year action in 1996. The case for it is that other trading nations won’t make agreements with the United States unless they can be assured that Congress won’t pick the deals apart with amendments.

Congressional Democrats want labor and environmental conditions set in advance. “The delay in sending up a detailed bill is hopefully a sign that a majority of Democrats and their concerns are being heard,” said Rep. Dick Gephardt, the House minority leader.

The Republican counteroffer is to empower presidents to set conditions on environmental and labor standards in future treaties, so long as they apply directly to trade in specific products.

That isn’t going to satisfy Gephardt and his allies. The administration needs to find terms that will satisfy enough Democrats to win, knowing that Gephardt and a majority of them will vote no.

Vice President Al Gore will be a leading spokesman for the White House, promising a collision with Gephardt that may preview their likely competition for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.

Indeed, when the administration withheld specific fast-track legislation more than three months ago, Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who supports the authority, complained that the bill was being held up because of political calculations involving Gore.

Not so, the administration said, and there was no campaign logic to it anyhow. But it reflected frustration at the delay among fast-track supporters, who said even then that if Clinton didn’t send Congress a bill, there wouldn’t be time to act on one this year and he might not get one in 1998, with a campaign on.

They’re waiting and warning that more lost time, even days, makes it less likely that he will get one in 1997.

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