On the Scene: Freeing Trade

THE SCENE was the Senate Finance Committee, which was opening hearings about the President’s proposals for GATT and a Mexican Free Trade Agreement. Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D., Tex.), the silver-haired chairman, was emphasizing that what they were talking about was not an agreement at all but renewing the President’s authority to continue the talks that might lead to one. Alluding to opposition from fellow Texan Kika de la Garza, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Bentsen picked up a virgin white sheet of paper and addressed the audience. “It’s a blank page,” he said. “You mean we don’t have the courage to negotiate?”

It was a neat performance, even if the blank-paper bit was cribbed from U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, who had used it a week before during a speech in Chicago. For one of the ironies of the whole Mexican Free Trade Agreement debate is that there is as yet no agreement—and there won’t be for at least a year or so. What’s at stake is the President’s “fast-track” authority: the power (which U.S. Presidents have had since the 1970s) to negotiate trade agreements and then submit them to Congress for an up-or-down vote as is, without any 11th-hour changes on behalf of this or that special interest. Senator Bentsen and House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (Ill.) both say fast-track is necessary if the U.S. is “to have any credibility in pursuing negotiations within either a multilateral or bilateral context.”

WM

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William McGurn

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THE SCENE was the Senate Finance Committee, which was opening hearings about the President’s proposals for GATT and a Mexican Free Trade Agreement. Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D., Tex.), the silver-haired chairman, was emphasizing that what they were talking about was not an agreement at all but renewing the President’s authority to continue the talks that might lead to one. Alluding to opposition from fellow Texan Kika de la Garza, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Bentsen picked up a virgin white sheet of paper and addressed the audience. “It’s a blank page,” he said. “You mean we don’t have the courage to negotiate?”

It was a neat performance, even if the blank-paper bit was cribbed from U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, who had used it a week before during a speech in Chicago. For one of the ironies of the whole Mexican Free Trade Agreement debate is that there is as yet no agreement—and there won’t be for at least a year or so. What’s at stake is the President’s “fast-track” authority: the power (which U.S. Presidents have had since the 1970s) to negotiate trade agreements and then submit them to Congress for an up-or-down vote as is, without any 11th-hour changes on behalf of this or that special interest. Senator Bentsen and House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (Ill.) both say fast-track is necessary if the U.S. is “to have any credibility in pursuing negotiations within either a multilateral or bilateral context.”