The Senate half is done. From Reuters:
President Barack Obama scored a major victory on Friday when the U.S. Senate voted to give him "fast-track" powers that would help wrap up negotiations on a 12-nation Pacific Rim trade deal central to projecting American influence in Asia.
But the House half is not:
Attention now turns to the House of Representatives, where opposition is deeper to granting the president power to negotiate trade deals that can be approved or rejected by Congress but not amended.
Of course, TPA is just the precursor to TPP. So how does everyone see the TPP right now? Is the glass half empty or half full? Some people say the TPP could be wrapped up two weeks after TPA passes. That sounds like a stretch, although I really have no idea how much negotiating is left.
But then we get to the real test: A massive debate over the publicized TPP text when it is released. I don't have a sense of what the debate will be like in other countries, but I predict that it will be like nothing we have ever seen on trade in the U.S., for three reasons: The experience we now have with the "non-trade" provisions, the internet, and the size of the countries involved.
The 1993-1994 debate over the WTO and NAFTA was a pretty big deal, but that debate was mainly just about trade itself, in particular trade with developing countries. People did not have much to say about ISDS and IP protection at the time; these days, by contrast, they have a lot to say.
And now they have a place to say it: The internet. I'm sure there were some forcefully written letters to the editor regarding NAFTA, and some nicely bound policy papers, but how much impact could that really have? These days, opponents of major government initiatives of all sorts have a real voice, and can get their message heard.
And yes, we have had these debates before on a smaller scale, with CAFTA and some bilateral FTAs. But the TPP is so much bigger, and involves countries such as Viet Nam, Japan, Brunei and Malaysia, which get particular groups fired up.
The TPP debate -- if we get that far -- will keep everyone occupied for a few months, but it's still not clear to me whether we will be spending the next few years adapting to a world where the TPP (and maybe the TTIP) are shaping the future of trade governance, or whether those years will be spent figuring out why the TPP failed and what to do next.