Back On Track
The precarious fortunes of free trade.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
December 5, 2001 4:30 p.m.

he cause of free trade dodged a bullet today as Senator Phil Gramm, Texas Republican, said he would now support legislation to give the president authority to negotiate trade agreements. The bill commits Congress to voting up or down, with no amendments, on any deal the president's team negotiates. It's an arrangement that recognizes the reality that other countries are not going to make deals with us if Congress threatens to rewrite them.

Gramm is perhaps the best spokesman for free trade in Congress. "I'm for trade and I'm for its promotion," he told us today. But he was resisting the House version of trade promotion authority because he feared some provisions regarding labor and environmental issues that were put in the bill to appease liberals. In a mid-November letter to President Bush, Gramm and five other senators wrote that because of these provisions, "this legislation would constitute an unacceptable threat to U.S. sovereignty, and an unwarranted intrusion into U.S. domestic policymaking."

The House plans to vote on the bill tomorrow. Gramm's opposition, if continued, would almost certainly have led to a defeat. Passage has always been a dicey proposition. Democrats are opposing the bill, allegedly because they want tougher international regulation of labor and the environment. (We think that this position, untenable for a lot of reasons, is mainly a smokescreen for Democrats who want to vote against free trade to keep the unions happy but don't want to be seen as protectionists.) Some Republicans are opposed, too. Some of them are driven by local protectionist lobbies. Others are being short-sighted, toying with opposing the bill as a way to stiff the president in retaliation for his perceived abandonment of them on the airport security bill — or to protest the $22 billion in unemployment benefits that Republicans have agreed to pass in the stimulus bill in order to get Democratic support. If free-trading Republicans peeled off, the bill couldn't survive.

But Gramm's concerns have now been addressed. The bill will no longer require that any deal allow other countries to impose tariffs on American products to punish our policies toward labor or the environment. "You're never going to get a bill that's perfect, but this one's good enough," he says.

The onus is now on the Democrats, especially those who pride themselves on their friendliness to business and free markets. As The Washington Post editorializes today, any such boasts will be disproven if they vote against trade. The Democrats' remaining objections-voiced on the facing page of the Post by Rep. Sander Levin — are weak. If in the end House Democrats conclude that a free-trade deal that this or some future president makes would hurt workers or the environment, they can vote against that deal. Voting no tomorrow means that no deal can be presented to Congress at all. It is a vote to strangle trade talks in the crib.

Slander Watch
NAACP chairman Julian Bond's habit of calling conservatives "the Taliban wing of American politics" was always offensive. After September 11, it's obscene. But the Detroit Free Press reported yesterday that Bond is still at it. The remark came as Bond explained that the NAACP will work with the ACLU against domestic-security procedures being instituted by John Ashcroft. "He knows something about the Taliban, coming as he does from that wing of American politics. Even before September 11, he had moved the department to the far right, making it headquarters for the Federalist Society." (Our thanks to James Taranto, whose "Best of the Web" feature for opinionjournal.com alerted us to the quote.)

Who's Running HSS
Why is a department of the Bush administration inviting conservatives to speak and then insulting and silencing them? And why aren't there any consequences for this behavior. Read Stanley Kurtz's account.

Also Worth Reading
Robert Poole on how to fix airport security now that a bad bill's been passed.