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America's Post-Election Priority: by John O'Leary
Toward a Bipartisian Trade Policy
Published: Saturday, May 8, 2004
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With U.S. international trade policy an issue in domestic politics once again (remember that "giant sucking sound" from the 1992 campaign?), now is not too soon to start looking beyond the partisan debates of the day and the November 2 presidential election that will settle them.

The next administration, whether led by President Kerry or President Bush, will have no long-term foreign policy priority with more lasting economic importance to our country's national interest, or more day-to-day impact on how ordinary Americans live their lives or build their futures, than the shaping of a bipartisan trade policy for the United States.

Over the course of the next few months, the focus of the debate about trade policy will be shaped by candidates for federal office in the rough-and-tumble of an election year. They will argue about, and struggle for partisan advantage on, such issues of the day as outsourcing of American jobs, tax policy, corporate investments abroad and what we need to do to assure that free trade will be fair trade.

What presidential and congressional candidates probably will not be saying much about these next few months will be the growing backlog of free trade agreements. These agreements have recently been negotiated, or are in the process of being negotiated, but our Congress has not yet considered them on their merits. Those agreements now involve eight other countries: the six-way Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) deal with Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, as well as the Australia and Morocco bilateral agreements. The political reality is that neither the Bush administration nor Congress is eager to put any free trade agreement to a vote on Capitol Hill before the American voters have their say in our elections later this year.

The day of political reckoning, however, on these pending free trade agreements and several now in the works with other countries (for example, Bahrain, Colombia and Thailand) will not be postponed very long. If not in a lame duck session of Congress later this year, then early in the new Congress next year, the president will need to ask lawmakers to put the substantive work of our negotiators, with or without further executive review, to an up-or-down vote.

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