POLITICS: WHITE HOUSE
Obama proves Tom Cotton right

BY CHARLES HOSKINSON | MARCH 22, 2015 | 5:00 AM

"Negotiating with a foreign nation is the president's responsibility. If there's confusion on...President Obama twice failed to honor his predecessor's signatures on free-trade deals, doing exactly what a letter from 47 Republican senators suggested the next president might do with an Iran nuclear deal not approved by Congress — refuse to honor it and demand modifications.

The apparent contradiction hasn't dimmed the Democratic outrage over the GOP's March 9 letter. Obama said the signatories of the letter organized by freshman Tom Cotton of Arkansas were siding with Iran's hardliners. Secretary of State John Kerry called the letter false and unprecedented. Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the letter put U.S. credibility at risk.

"Negotiating with a foreign nation is the president's responsibility. If there's confusion on this basic point, no foreign government will trust that when a president purports to speak for our country, he actually does," he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday.

But that's not what Democrats — including Obama — were saying when they sabotaged free-trade deals with Colombia and South Korea negotiated and signed by the administration of George W. Bush. When he took office, Obama sent those deals back to the two governments for modifications to overcome Democratic objections before submitting them to Congress for approval.

In 2008, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi changed House rules to prevent consideration of the Colombia deal after Bush submitted it under "fast track authority" setting a time limit for Congress to approve or reject it, even though Colombia's congress had already ratified the agreement. Fast-track authority allows the president to submit trade deals to Congress for a vote without amendments.

"A successful trade agenda depends on joint partnership between the Congress and the administration," Pelosi said on April 10, 2008, the day the House passed the rule change. "By his actions on Tuesday, the president abandoned the traditions of consultation that have governed past agreements. In fact, the action the House takes today is more in keeping with the spirit of the rules than the White House's move to force a vote."

"The day that the House voted to unplug fast-track for the Bush administration, it was an embarrassing day," said Tim Keeler, who was chief of staff in the U.S. Trade Representative's office from 2006 to 2009. "She essentially put it on ice for the rest of the Bush administration.

"It could have been an awkward diplomatic situation," except for Colombia's "calm and measured" response, added Keeler, now a trade lawyer with Mayer Brown in Washington.

Bush never submitted the South Korea deal, recognizing that it also might fail to win approval, Keeler said.

Because of the dispute over the Colombia agreement, Democrats controlling Congress at the time also allowed a 2002 law calling for "fast-track" consideration of trade deals to expire, a move that ironically has forced Obama to ask the current Republican-controlled Congress to reinstate it so he can advance one of his top priorities, a trade pact among 12 Pacific Rim nations.

When Obama took office, he ordered the Trade Representative's office to renegotiate both the Colombia and South Korean deals to overcome Democratic opposition, and both were eventually approved after the two countries agreed to changes demanded by his administration.

When the new agreement with South Korea was signed in 2010, the Obama administration took credit for it.

"The U.S.-South Korea agreement is an integral part of the president's efforts to increase opportunities for U.S. businesses, farmers and workers through improved access for their products and services in foreign markets, and supports the President's National Export Initiative goal of doubling of U.S. exports in five years," the White House said.

There is a difference between a free-trade deal, which requires congressional approval, and an executive agreement, which is what the administration says any Iran deal would be and why Obama refuses to submit it to Congress for approval.

"There's a long history and a long precedent for these types of government-to-government international agreements," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said March 12, noting that many important U.S. security arrangements have been executive agreements not binding under international law.

Among them are agreements governing the status of U.S. forces stationed in foreign countries, such as the one Obama signed with Afghanistan last year.

But as senators, Obama and Kerry also co-sponsored legislation in 2008 that would have required Bush to submit any status-of-forces agreement with Iraq for Senate ratification as a treaty, which is what many Republican senators have demanded Obama do with any nuclear deal with Iran.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., sponsor of a bill to require congressional approval of a nuclear deal, confronted Kerry over this apparent hypocrisy on March 11 when the secretary came before his committee.

"I understand that in this world sometimes where you stand is where you sit," Corker said. "Certainly positions change sometime depending on which side of the table you're sitting."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ob...rticle/2561838