Will There Be a Lighthizer-Liberal Alliance on Trade?
This is from the Daily Beast:
During his first six months in office, Donald Trump’s top trade official met with a host of companies, trade associations, and industry groups. He also carved out a little time for an unsuspected visitor: an employee of Ralph Nader’s former progressive nonprofit.
Lori Wallach, the director of the group Public Citizen’s global trade arm, met with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in May and June, according to a copy of his schedule released through the Freedom of Information Act. In fact, she was one of the very few individuals with whom Lighthizer had multiple sit-downs during that time period.
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“I’ve known Bob Lighthizer for a long time because there are not a lot of people who are trade experts and who know the substance of the agreements and the laws very well,” Wallach said in an interview on Monday. “I have closely followed his work. I’ve learned stuff from his perspective.”
Can Lighthizer make enough changes to the U.S. trade agreement model to bring liberals/progressives on board? Phil Levy sees some possibilities here, but in the end is skeptical:
... So however much Lighthizer declares that he is solely concerned with pleasing the president, he would ultimately need to build a congressional majority to get any trade deal passed.
First, many of the criticisms that President Trump has lodged against trade agreements and NAFTA sound much closer to traditional Democratic complaints than to Republican stances. As one example, the administration’s opposition to Investor State Dispute Settlement fits well with the thinking of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, two ardent critics of the TPP. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), another inveterate trade critic, explicitly spoke of a new trade coalition with “a lot of Democrats and some Republicans.”
Second, the president has shown an openness to working with Democrats, at least when it came to the debt ceiling; an immigration deal has proven more problematic. But if the administration does decide to cross the aisle for support, here are four questions to consider:
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None of this is to reject the goal of restoring bipartisan support for trade agreements. It just seems unlikely that such a coalition will emerge from the starting point of extreme trade skepticism that President Trump and Lighthizer bring to the table.