Conservatives may worry that supporting trade promotion authority undermines their criticism of President Obama for abusing the Constitution’s executive power. Some neo-isolationists in the Republican party may even oppose TPA because they believe it contradicts their opposition to Obama’s foreign policies. Conservatives needn’t worry about these faux claims of contradictions — they are only made up by the intellectually lazy or sloppy journalists who don’t understand the Constitution’s separation of powers in the first place.

The most important difference between trade promotion authority — informally known as “fast-track” among the trade cognoscenti — and Obama’s unilateral orders on immigration, drugs, health care, welfare (take your pick) is that Congress has authorized the former. With trade authority, Congress delegates authority to the president to negotiate the best deal possible with our foreign partners, but he has no opportunity to put the agreement into effect himself. Congress still has an up-or-down vote on the trade deal.

Trade authority would be akin to Obama’s abuses of authority only if the White House simply negotiated and then put into effect a trade deal without any congressional approval. I am not claiming that President Obama suddenly has a newfound respect for the Constitution when it comes to treaties — as John Bolton and I argued in a recent issue of National Review, the administration is currently considering unconstitutional methods to reach a deal with Iran, among others.

A second difference between trade promotion authority and Obama’s abuses rests in how TPA works, which I fear escapes liberals accusing conservatives of hypocrisy. Trade promotion doesn’t actually give the president any authority he does not currently have. Obama, like his predecessors, can negotiate any trade deals that he likes. But they are just empty words on paper until Congress approves them. TPA only represents a limitation on Congress — passed by Congress — in how it will consider trade deals for approval. In the past, Congress made trade deals difficult by seeking to amend the agreements, which would require new rounds of negotiations and would delay the deals for years, if not decades. Other nations would not take the United States’s proposals seriously if they knew that Congress might cross them out during legislative review.

So in TPAs of the past, Congress promised to give trade agreements an expedited schedule and to allow them an up-or-down vote without amendments. Only Congress has the constitutional authority to decide its own rules, and in the TPA that is all it is doing. Congress can still always vote down the agreement, and without Congress’s consent, President Obama’s trade deals will amount to nothing.