Republican opponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership have begun calling it Obamatrade. And yet most of the plan’s opponents are from the President’s own party. Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

The political battle over the enormous, twelve-nation trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership keeps getting stranger. President Obama has made the completion of the deal the number-one legislative priority of his second term. Indeed, Republican opponents of the T.P.P., in an effort to rally the red-state troops, have begun calling it Obamatrade. And yet most of the plan’s opponents are not Republicans; they’re Democrats.

Obama’s chief allies in his vote-by-vote fight in the House of Representatives to win “fast-track authority” to negotiate this and other trade deals are Speaker John Boehner and Representative Paul Ryan—not his usual foxhole companions. The vote may come as soon as Friday. The House Republican leaders tell their dubious members that they are supporting Obama only in order to “constrain” him. Meanwhile, Obama is lobbying members of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose support he can normally count on, tirelessly and, for the most part, fruitlessly. “The president’s done everything except let me fly Air Force One,” Representative Cedric Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana, told the Christian Science Monitor_ _this week. Nonetheless, Richmond said, “I’m leaning no.”

The long, bad aftertaste of NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted in 1994—explains much of the Democratic opposition to the T.P.P. Ronald Reagan originally proposed NAFTA, but Bill Clinton championed it, got it through Congress mainly on Republican votes, and signed it. In many Democratic districts, NAFTA is still widely blamed for the loss of hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs, and for long-term downward pressure on wages. When President Obama argues that the T.P.P. is not NAFTA, he is correct. It convenes Pacific Rim nations and economies of many stripes, from wealthy, democratic Japan to authoritarian, impoverished Vietnam, and it includes six countries with which the United States already has free-trade agreements. If enacted, it will encompass forty per cent of global economic activity. It is less a traditional trade deal than a comprehensive economic treaty and, at least for the United States, a strategic hedge against the vast and growing weight of Chinese regional influence. What exactly the T.P.P. will do, however, is difficult to know, because its terms are being negotiated in secret. Only “cleared advisors,” most of them representing various private industries, are permitted to work on the text. Leaked drafts of chapters have occasionally surfaced—enough to alarm, among others, environmentalists, labor groups, and advocates for affordable medicine.

Some of the fear and loathing inspired by the T.P.P. is hard to take seriously. Conservative opponents of immigration reform, for instance, have descried in the T.P.P. a Trojan horse, inside which, they fear, the dreaded immigration reform will be smuggled into law. (Paul Ryan has tried to debunk this notion, calling it an “urban legend.”) There are House Republicans who seemingly refuse to support any measure that Obama wants, simply because he wants it. Last week, contemplating the approaching fast-track vote, Representative Ryan Zinke, of Montana, said, “We are talking about giving Barack Obama—a President who negotiates with rogue nations like Iran and Cuba—exorbitant authority to do what he thinks is best.” Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander, went on, “I don’t have faith that President Obama will negotiate in the best interest of Montana or America.”

More substantive objections to the T.P.P. have emerged from senators and representatives, who are now allowed, under strictly controlled conditions—in a guarded basement room under the Capitol, with no note-taking—to read drafts of the eight-hundred-page agreement. Senator Elizabeth Warren has criticized its provisions for “investor-state dispute settlement.” I.S.D.S. allows corporations to sue governments over laws that may adversely affect “expected future profits.” Environmental regulations, public-health measures, and even minimum-wage laws can be challenged under I.S.D.S., which is already a feature of many trade agreements. A Swedish power company is currently suing Germany, seeking $4.6 billion in damages, because of steps Germany is taking to phase out nuclear power, and Philip Morris is suing to prevent Uruguay and Australia from implementing policies to reduce smoking. Under the T.P.P., the international tribunals that would hear such cases would not, according to Warren, be staffed by judges but by a rotating cast of corporate lawyers. Challenges to American laws should at least be lodged, she argues, in American courts.

WikiLeaks has published T.P.P. draft chapters on investment, the environment, and two versions, from 2013 and 2014, of the intellectual-property-rights chapter. The environment chapter was a major disappointment to activists who had been led to believe that it would contain real enforcement mechanisms. In the Sierra Club’s analysis, the T.P.P. will generate a rapid increase in exports of American liquefied natural gas, which will in turn lead to more fracking, more methane emissions, a shift of the domestic energy market from gas toward coal, and the exacerbation of climate change. The proposed intellectual-property agreements appear to have been dictated by the entertainment, tech, and pharmaceutical industries. Doctors Without Borders declared that, if the drug-patent provisions do not change in the final draft, the T.P.P. is on track to become “the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines” in developing countries. With each glimpse of the draft chapters, the coalition opposing the agreement grows. Even a “sweetener” in the form of assistance for workers who lose their jobs because of trade agreements turns out to be partly financed by a seven-hundred-million-dollar raid on Medicare. Now Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, is trying to raise a hundred thousand dollars through crowdsourcing, planning to offer the money as a reward to anyone who leaks the entire T.P.P. text—twenty-nine chapters’ worth.

With the fast-track authority that President Obama seeks, he would be able to negotiate trade agreements and present them to Congress for an up-or-down vote, with no amendments or filibusters permitted. Such agreements would then require only fifty-one votes, not sixty, to pass. Paul Ryan recently said, on CNN, that “every President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has had” some form of fast-track authority. That is not quite right—Richard Nixon never got it, although he initiated the modern version of it. Still, not having it plainly galls Obama. And his only realistic hope of enacting the T.P.P. now turns on getting fast-track authority from the House.

The Senate passed fast-track last month, sixty-two to thirty-seven, with only fourteen Democrats voting yes. Boehner and Ryan expect to be able to produce two hundred Republican votes. That means eighteen Democratic votes are needed. Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader, is reported to be working closely with Boehner and Ryan to come up with the number they need—although she still hasn’t said which way she’ll vote herself. That’s how strange the legislative politics of the T.P.P. have become. Nearly every constituency in the Democratic Party opposes it; and the more they learn about it, the more they oppose it. And yet their leader, Obama, wants it badly.

But why? Maybe it’s a better agreement—better for the American middle class, for American workers—than it seems in the leaked drafts, where it appears bent to the will of multinational corporations. John Kerry, the Secretary of State, and Ashton Carter, the Secretary of Defense, co-authored a column on Monday in USA Today_ _arguing, in evangelical tones, that the T.P.P. will usher in a glorious new era of American-led prosperity, a “global race to the top” for all parties. Meanwhile, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. sees only a race to the bottom. Organized labor, by all accounts, plans to punish any elected Democrat who supports the T.P.P., or even supports fast-track for Obama, in the next campaign. It’s difficult, again, to evaluate the agreement when we can’t see it. And it will be difficult for Congress to do its job if its members can’t study each part of the many-tentacled T.P.P. on its merits, but must simply vote yes or no on the whole shebang. What’s the rush? Is it simply Obama’s wish to make his mark on history and to complete his pivot toward Asia before his time is up? Politicians are often accused of supporting pro-corporate policies to please wealthy backers, looking toward the next campaign. That can’t be Obama’s motive now.