Fast Track/TPP: Death of National Sovereignty, State Sovereignty, Separation of Powers and Democracy

[marmar]

By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and New Economic Perspectives. Originally published at Corrente


Most of the critical attention given to the Fast Track Trade Agreement legislation and to the associated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Congressional – Executive Agreement on mainstream corporate media and by politicians and establishment interest groups interacting with them in the beltway echo chamber, has focused on the likely or possible economic impacts of these. But relatively little attention has focused on sovereignty, constitutional separation of powers, or democracy impacts, which however are being covered increasingly well in alternative social media. See here, here, here, and here.

In hopes of breaking through this fragmentation by type of media of the debate over the TPP, I’ll focus this post only on governance impacts and try to make the case, that this so-called trade agreement, if passed and implemented would create profound governance changes in the United States without benefit of the constitutional amendments that would normally be required to accomplish such changes. I’ll also make the case that the governance impacts destroy national sovereignty, state sovereignty, separation of powers, and democracy.

Governance Impacts

The anti-democratic fast track process that gives Representatives and Senators no space to represent the range of people electing them. This process provides no room for debate of the TPP that includes the public and severely restricts Congressional debate.

It also incorporates secrecy of the TPP drafts, hiding them from the public and making it an impossible burden for Congresspeople to evaluate them and to solicit the views of their constituencies about them. It also then provides for keeping the proposed or actual agreement secret so that the American people can’t even know what the law is that may result in international levies of many billions of dollars upon them, for four years after the TPP is either passed or defeated.

Of course, Congress can simply take back the policy space that would be taken from them by Fast Track by defeating it, letting the Executive know in no uncertain terms that the sense of Congress is that Fast Track is an improper device for getting around Congress’s constitutional role in reviewing and giving its informed consent to Congressional – Executive Agreements, and that Fast Track proposals from the Executive Branch preceding trade deals will from then on be dead on arrival. .............(more)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/fast-tracktpp-death-national-sovereignty-state-sovereignty-separation-powers-democracy.html

[appal_jack]

1. What, exactly, is the Constitutional status of a "Congressional-Executive Agreement"?

It seems to me that TPP supporters are trying to have it both ways. They want the TPP and other trade agreements to supersede the Constitution, yet they are unwilling and unable to muster the votes necessary to pass an actual treaty, much less a series of Constitutional Amendments.

The author, Joe Firestone, does grapple with these questions further down in the article:

Treaties are the law of the land, and they trump previously passed legislation. But, first, according to the Constitution a Congressional – Executive Agreement is not a treaty. And second, even if it were, it would not trump the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. So, Federalism, as expressed in Amendment 10, means that the states of the union have a limited sphere of state sovereignty that cannot be breached by either the Federal government, or by treaties or international agreements concluded by it.

And that sphere of state sovereignty is precisely in the area of providing for the general welfare of its citizens. If a state in the US decides, for example, that the Federal minimum wage isn’t high enough for the general welfare of its citizens, it is free, right now, to pass a minimum wage at any level exceeding the Federal minimum that it thinks is desirable. Multinational corporations have nothing to say about this in any tribunal, but under the TPP they could sue the State for lost profits and collect damages.

So, if enacted, the TPP would violate Federalism, state sovereignty, and therefore the Constitution of the United States, in a way that the Federal Government cannot now do. It is clearly an unconstitutional treaty, which the United States has no right to conclude.

This is an important column. K&R,

-app

[woo me with science]

2. +100000 It's nothing less than a corporate coup of democracy

by corporate fascists pretending to be Republicans and Democrats.

It is time to end the monied corruption and subversion of our democratic government and the replacement of our news media with lying corporate propaganda machines.

Enough is enough.

[appal_jack]

3. Stopping TPA (Fast Track) is our best chance to prevent the coup. Kicking again. nt