Bernie Sanders wants to get the Democratic party to go on record in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. | AP Photo Sanders takes aim at Democratic platform As committee prepares to vote, the Vermont senator is threatening a fight over TPP, fracking, and other issues.

Bernie Sanders has one big demand when the Democratic National Committee's full platform committee meets in Orlando on Friday: Put the party on record as strongly opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

When the 187-member panel considers amendments to the draft platform hammered out by the 15-person drafting committee, Sanders’ allies will look to push a long list of policy tweaks: a carbon tax, a ban on fracking and language promising to expand Medicare.


Opposing TPP — the sweeping 12-nation trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration — is the biggest prize.

“There is no daylight between the campaigns on TPP. We believe we have a reasonable shot at winning that amendment and we're going to fight as hard as we can,” Sanders senior policy adviser Warren Gunnels said.

But that’s not quite correct.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Sanders both oppose TPP, but only Sanders has been full-throated in his insistence that trade deals hurt American workers. Clinton has been far more nuanced, suggesting that she might have supported a version of the deal with more worker protections.

Since the platform-drafting process began, Sanders and his supporters have ramped up efforts to get the party to add language unequivocally opposing the deal. Jim Hightower, a Sanders campaign surrogate, will introduce an amendment that reads, “It is the policy of the Democratic Party that the Trans-Pacific Partnership must not get a vote in this Congress or in future sessions of Congress.”

The Sanders team is hoping to prevail on top liberal leaders and interest groups to push anti-TPP language. The sense among Sanders, as well as many other progressives, is that language opposing the TPP is one of the last missing puzzle pieces in a platform that party leaders have hailed as one of the most progressive ever produced by the party.

On Thursday, Sanders' campaign announced that it had collected over 700,000 signatures on a petition urging the Democratic Party to announce its opposition to a TPP vote.

“The overwhelming majority of Democrats are strongly opposed to this disastrous trade agreement,” Sanders said in a statement on Thursday. “If both Secretary Clinton and I agree that the TPP should not get to the floor of Congress this year, it’s hard to understand why this amendment would not be overwhelmingly passed.

In recent days, it hasn’t just been Sanders pushing for anti-TPP language. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a regular name on Clinton vice-presidential shortlists, recorded a video for the liberal CREDO Action, praising the organization’s members for staunchly opposing the deal and reiterating her own opposition for it as well. Sanders has also talked repeatedly with Warren about fighting TPP, Gunnels said.

“America shouldn’t be signing lousy trade deals — period,” Warren said in the video.

That video follows CREDO Action pushing a petition demanding that the “Democratic National Convention Platform include unequivocal opposition to the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP).”

The Sanders campaign on Thursday released a list of a dozen amendments it wants added to the party platform in Orlando. TPP ranked No. 1 but there are others. The Vermont senator wants language calling for a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, a ban on fracking and an amendment opposing cuts to earned-pension amendments.

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, a Clinton supporter, sent a letter to the platform committee generally praising the platform draft but also calling for an amendment “for a Climate Test for federal infrastructure projects.” The letter didn’t echo Sanders’ list of environmental amendments he plans to submit (a ban on fracking, a carbon tax, a Keystone Pipeline Amendment) but it did reflect an interest among prominent environmentally minded Democrats to tinker with how the platform addresses climate change.

There’s optimism among Sanders supporters that some kind of climate change amendments will make it into the platform in Orlando.

“I imagine a frack ban and a carbon tax, but also a push to extend the test that Obama used in deciding Keystone — would it significantly exacerbate global warming? — to other policy questions,” environmentalist Bill McKibben, a Sanders-aligned DNC drafting committee member, wrote in an email. “I think that has a chance of passing — after all, why would a Clinton administration want to do things that make climate change significantly worse?”

The issue with all of Sanders’ amendments is he has a minority of members on the platform committee. Of the 187 members on the committee, 72 support Sanders, so the amendments he’s pushing have to have support among members picked by Clinton’s team or are aligned with the DNC.

“Their decision is what we allow to pass,” a top Sanders adviser said. “For us, we’re going to put the same stuff on the platform and it's just a question of whether they’re going to vote it down.”

If the Sanders campaign loses on some of the amendments the fight isn’t over, though. Twenty-five percent of voters could sign a minority report that would allow for an amendment to come up again at the national convention in Philadelphia.

Notably missing from Sanders’ priorities in Orlando are amendments addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two of the five Sanders backers on the drafting committee were on record denouncing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

But in behind-the-scenes discussions, Sanders aides have made clear that addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not as big a priority for the Vermont senator as trade or economic issues, according to multiple Clinton and Sanders officials with knowledge of those negotiations.

Still, one of the Sanders members of the drafting committee, James Zogby, said he and his allies would initiate a discussion about whether to add the word “occupation” to the platform plank discussing Israel and Palestine.

“We’ll reintroduce the language on occupation,” Zogby said. “I frankly was stunned that that became controversial and that that became a controversy when every administration called it ‘occupation’ and every administration, Democrat and Republican alike, called for [Israeli] settlements to end. Why that could not go in the platform I didn’t get.”

But Zogby said he doubts that Sanders would push hard at the national convention for an amendment addressing Israel and Palestine if it fails in Orlando.

“Will it be at the same level for him as TPP and Medicare for all? I don't think it is,” Zogby said. “These are things that have been in his stump speeches in the beginning. He was very forceful on the Middle East when he spoke about it, but you ask me what the defining issues of the Sanders campaign are and I'd say it was Medicare for all, it was the rigged political system.”