But If It’s Completed, Will It Pass? : As negotiators close in on free-trade pact, Gephardt’s concerns need not ruin a deal

With the all-important free-trade pact with Mexico reportedly closer to signing than ever, a political storm cloud has appeared on the Washington horizon. The question is whether congressional Democrats are playing presidential politics--or doing the right thing.

Leading the Democratic pack, House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt has publicly warned the Bush Administration that an impending free-trade agreement with Mexico and Canada might be rejected by Congress. He says that U.S. negotiators must do more to make sure that any such pact includes protection for the environment and retraining for displaced U.S. workers.

That has gotten Gephardt plenty of political flak from critics who accuse him of neo-protectionist and political opportunism. Are the Democrats simply out to deny Bush a diplomatic victory in this election year?

For his part, the House majority leader vehemently denies he seeks to undermine the trade negotiations at the last moment. Rather, he says he wants only to make sure those talks produce a viable trade pact that can be accepted by his fellow congressional Democrats--who took no small political risk in initially supporting the North American free-trade talks.

In truth, the proposals that Gephardt has made regarding the free-trade negotiations--with the support of respectable, non-protectionist Democrats, by the way--need not get in the way of completing a final agreement. Take his idea for a joint U.S.-Mexico border commission to oversee environmental problems in the borderlands, where much industrial growth--and resulting pollution--is expected to take place once a free-trade pact is completed. Certainly if the negotiators tried to work out the details of how this commission would work (its membership, its powers and the like) they could be bogged down in detail and meetings for months if not years.

But Gephardt says he proposes only that the draft trade agreement have a clause creating such a commission. He says he’s content to leave the details to the parallel environmental talks that have been going on between the United States and Mexico.

The same notion could be applied to Gephardt’s proposal for a border transaction tax that would help create a fund to pay for the retraining of any U.S. workers who might lose jobs if their employers relocated to Mexico. That is an issue of real concern in those industrial states far from the border, like Gephardt’s home state of Missouri, which can point to plant shutdowns and to jobs moved south of the border. To not include at least some language to that effect in the free-trade agreement--a small bow, in effect, to U.S. workers’ concerns about job losses--is asking for trouble in an election year.