Sen. Sherrod Brown meets with local officials regarding VA claims backlog

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.

(Marvin Fong/The Plain Dealer))

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown has as many amendments to the long-awaited fast-track trade deal this week as Ohio has counties: 88.

No other lawmaker is likely to have as many demands to address child and forced labor, currency manipulation, foreign workplace and environmental standards and help for American workers who lose jobs when their work moves overseas.

It's unclear if Senate Finance Committee leaders will let Brown offer all 88 amendments. They have scheduled a meeting Wednesday to discuss the pending legislation, mark it up with changes where there is agreement, and vote. Then the matter will move on to the full Senate and, later, the House. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, foreign governments, manufacturing interests, major global corporations and big labor will be watching.

Brown, a Democrat who has authored a book about foreign trade, may be more invested in the outcome than any other Democratic senator, at least when measured by time and interest spent on the issue. His Ohio colleague, Ohio Republican Rob Portman, also has put in time in the global trade trenches, as trade ambassador for former President George W. Bush and as a private-sector attorney before he entered politics.

At stake this week is a new bill to grant trade promotion authority, or TPP, to President Barack Obama and his successor, regardless of political party. TPP is better known as fast-track authority, because it gives a president the authority to implement trade agreements with other nations without interference from Congress. The last fast-track bill expired in 2007.

The latest bill lays out a series of objectives and protections that Congress wants to see in any new trade deal, particularly the big one that Obama wants to wrap up soon, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If Congress decided that this or future deals did not address its objectives, it could block or change the new trade treaty as long as 60 senators agreed.

But a number of senators, and especially Brown, want to make sure the objectives are clear and enforceable.

Some of Brown's amendments would:

* Close an existing loophole that allows countries that use forced or child labor to export their products to the United States.

* Increase training and financial aid to workers who lost their jobs due to foreign trade. Brown wants $575 million a year, a level in force temporarily during the height of the recession.

* Make the president notify Congress when a trade agreement is about to go into force and allow Congress to review it. There can be a lag between the signing of a trade deal and its implementation, and Brown says he wants Congress to be able to see if anything has changed.

* Make the administration provide detailed annual reports, with data for each state, showing the effect of imports.

Although import data is now available from the Commerce Department, it is not always easily digestible, and critics say that like any data, it is open to statistical manipulation.

A recent example of this was seen when Democratic lawmakers including U.S. Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo and Tim Ryan of Niles accused U. S. Trade Representative Michael Froman's office of playing games with the data. Froman's office said its statistics were accurate and that Congress members were trying to "cook the books."

Brown also has amendments addressing worker safety standards, environmental standards and currency manipulation. Countries with weak safety standards can produce goods more cheaply because they don't spend money protecting their workers from harm or they operate sweatshops of the kind the United States outlawed long ago. The same goes for countries that don't make their factories adhere to environmental standards.

And a country can manipulate the value of its currency to undercut the U.S. dollar, another way of making it harder for the United States to compete.

The deal on Wednesday actually involves four separate bills but they fall under the umbrella of trade and could be merged. They all could affect the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending deal between the United States and 11 other countries including Canada, Mexico, Japan and Vietnam.

Another concern of Brown's: China could be brought into the TPP at a later date. China is not part of a specific trade agreement with the United States, although the two countries trade with one another extensively -- and China sells more to the United States than vice versa. Brown has long voiced concerns about China's wage, safety and environmental standards and its past manipulation of currency.

That's why this week is so important, and why he says he has 88 amendments.

"Number one, fast track will affect at least 60 percent of the world's economy," he said in a telephone interview." Forty percent of the world's economy would fall under the TPP, and another 20 percent would be affected by other details of the fast-track legislation, he said.

"Number two, there is increasing buzz that people want to use this agreement to bring China in through the back door. China is the second largest economy in the world. Third, this is the first fast track (deal) in 12 years. And fourth is the secrecy surrounding this.

"By most measurements, it's easier to get access to Iran-sanctions classified information or information about the Department of Defense and CIA activities than it is to see this (TPP) agreement.

"So all of those factors say 'don't fast track this fast-track bill.'"

Wednesday could be a long day in the Senate Finance Committee. But as Brown notes, senators only first saw the proposed fast-track bill last Thursday.

"These are not just fill-up time amendments," he said. "These are all substantive amendments we've been working on a long time. This would make trade promotion authority work. I've always supported more trade, I just don't want to do it under the rules that this fast-track bill now provides. There are ways of improving it."