Carol Keiser in the Washington Times on President Obama and Trade Promotion Authority:

The White House trade agenda suffered a new setback last week when the Senate rejected a bill to strengthen the president’s ability to conduct trade diplomacy with other countries.
Sounds like another sorry example of Washington’s partisan paralysis, doesn’t it?
Now consider this bizarre fact: Republicans offered the proposal and Democrats defeated it. Shouldn’t it have been the other way around? …
Now we’ve witnessed a brand-new species of gridlock: Senate Democrats have denied a president of their own party the power to hold meaningful trade talks with other nations. If the United States had a parliamentary system, this would be like a vote of no confidence in the government.