Democrats Fight Trump and One Another Over Trade
JUSTIN MILLER
The American Prospect

While Clinton has committed herself to renegotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, progressive opponents of the 12-nation trade agreement are furious that the party’s platform committee has failed to decisively oppose the trade deal as it currently stands.

Last week, Clinton supporters on the Democratic National Committee’s platform-drafting committee voted down an amendment that would have asserted that President Obama should not send the TPP to a lame-duck Congress for a vote after the election—a prospect that some observers say would assure passage with Republican support. The measure had been proposed by a Bernie Sanders ally, Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison.

In order to pass the amendment, a majority of the 187 DNC platform committee delegates must vote in favor of it. The Sanders campaign has 70 delegates, according to Cohen, and several more platform committee members are also members of unions. Cohen says the campaign expects labor groups, especially the AFL-CIO, to help mobilize support.

“We oppose a lame duck session on TPP, as does Hillary Clinton,” AFL-CIO Director of Communications Eric Hauser said in a statement to the Prospect, but did he not comment on whether the labor federation will actively lobby delegates to support the amendment.

Meanwhile, the intra-party rift is chum in the water for Donald Trump. On Tuesday, the likely Republican nominee lashed out at Clinton for her past support for trade deals, including TPP. When she was Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton called the TPP the “gold standard” of trade deals. However, she switched stances in October—a move that many attributed to Sanders’s aggressive anti-TPP campaign positions.

Unlike many who question Clinton’s commitment to opposing TPP, Trumka says he doesn’t think she’ll flip-flop again.