Robert E. Lighthizer, seated beside former senator Robert Dole, testifies before the Senate Finance Committee during his confirmation hearing March 14. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

When it comes to trade, the Trump effect was on full display in the Senate on Thursday.

Fully 37 Democrats voted to confirm the new U.S. trade representative, abandoning their partisan posture and instead embracing President Trump’s pledge to renegotiate existing trade deals and to scuttle those in the works. Those Democrats were joined by 45 Republicans who voted for Robert E. Lighthizer, a rare bipartisan moment coming a day after Democrats demanded an independent criminal investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign after he fired James B. Comey as FBI director.

The trade issue has been turned on its head, to a position where there is now a bipartisan majority in Congress opposing the global economic strategy that has driven U.S. trade policy for the past 35 years.

“In our party, I think there’s an intensity about this issue that maybe wasn’t there a few years ago,” said Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.).

Casey said that the 2016 campaign brought the trade issue to the fore unlike any presidential race in recent memory, and Trump’s sweep of the industrial Midwest sent a shock through the party that altered its view on how global deals should be considered.

(Reuters)

“I do get a sense that people are asking a lot tougher questions about trade deals, whether they’re going to indeed be helpful or actually impact, in a negative way, working-class folks,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who spent the previous eight years in Congress fighting a Democratic White House on trade.

A staunch opponent of Trump on almost every issue, Peters embraced Lighthizer’s criticism of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement and his more skeptical views toward multil­ateral trade deals of the past. Peters said he thinks that Lighthizer, who served as deputy U.S. trade representative under President Ronald Reagan, might be the most skeptical nominee of trade deals ever confirmed to the post.

“It seems to be, based on his record and statements, certainly he takes a stand that I feel very comfortable with,” Peters said.

Just two years ago, a solid bipartisan majority supported free trade. In May 2015, 62 senators — 48 Republicans and 14 Democrats — approved fast-track authority so President Barack Obama could finalize the largest global trade pact ever attempted, the Trans Pacific Partnership. Several weeks later nearly 30 Democrats joined more than 190 Republicans to approve the fast-track deal in the House.

By the end of 2015, however, Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had taken off in the respective Republican and Democratic presidential primaries by lambasting TPP and NAFTA as representing everything wrong with Washington, supporting corporate profit margins over manufacturing workers in the United States.

It served as a double hit against Hillary Clinton, who had begun the negotiations on TPP while serving as secretary of state and who was first lady when Bill Clinton cinched the 1993 trade deal with Canada and Mexico.

By the spring of 2016, Republican incumbents running for reelection, who had supported the 2015 fast-track vote on trade, were renouncing TPP as a bad deal. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) soon announced that there were no longer enough votes to pass the trade deal.

And in one of his first formal acts as president, Trump withdrew from TPP.

There are certainly some classic free traders in the Senate, particularly among Republicans, but they have largely gone silent as Trump tries to revamp decades of past global policy.

McConnell’s own views on the nominee, for instance, were not discernible in remarks on the Senate floor Thursday morning. “We know the task before Mr. Lighthizer is an important one. I look forward to taking on this challenge and working with the administration,” he said, loyally voting for him later in the day without another word of support.

His biggest critics were two arch supporters of NAFTA and other trade deals, Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.). In a letter Wednesday, the duo criticized Lighthizer’s “vocal advocacy for protectionist shifts in our trade policies,” following a confirmation hearing in which the nominee embraced “an America-first trade policy.”

Only 11 Democrats voted against Lighthizer, almost all of whom are considered future presidential candidates or are among the most liberal wing of the caucus, the sort of senators who feel compelled to oppose almost every Trump nominee.

The others offered some of the strongest support for Lighthizer and said they tended to believe he would follow on Trump’s tough talk on trade. “My impression is, he’s not only knowledgeable but he’ll be determined, and I think we need that,” Casey said.

Republicans who still support the multilateral deals of the past are hopeful that Lighthizer’s background in the Reagan administration means he will be more thoughtful than some of Trump’s Twitter diplomacy on trade.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), a proud free-trader whose heavily agricultural state benefits from exports, said he had a “candid conversation” with the nominee about farm exports and came away cautiously optimistic.

“Right now, we’re in a tough patch, and we’re trying to get a trade policy squared away,” Roberts said. “And we’re having some degree of — well, let’s just say that — we’re having meaningful dialogue, okay?”

He started to praise TPP as a framework for how bilateral deals should be crafted, but then Roberts caught himself.

“I don’t want to ever say that word again,” he said, “because that’s not a good, you know, that’s not just a good set of initials to be talking about with the White House.”

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