House seeks to delay Colombia trade pact
White House expresses dismay at plan to wait until after the election for a vote on the accord, providing Obama and Clinton with political cover.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives plans today to delay until after the November election a controversial trade pact with Colombia, sparing Democratic presidential candidates the need to choose between businesses that support the deal and unions that oppose it.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, campaigning in advance of the April 22 Pennsylvania primary where the economy has suffered blue-collar job losses, have voiced opposition to the accord.
Clinton recently fired campaign strategist Mark Penn for his outside public relations work with the Colombian government. "The Colombia free trade deal, in my view, is not appropriate because of the history of suppression and targeted killings of labor organizers in Colombia," she told CNN.
Obama, in an exchange with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in the Wall Street Journal, also voiced concerns about the pact. "You've got a government that is under a cloud of potentially having supported violence against unions, against labor, against opposition," he said. "That's not the kind of behavior that we want to reward. I think until we get that straightened out it's inappropriate for us to move forward."
Today, with Obama traveling in Indiana and Clinton scheduled to hold several Democratic dinners in Pennsylvania, the political ground in the Democratic race shifted back to Washington, where the House began debating a procedural gambit to drop the "fast-track" authority that puts a 90-day deadline on action.
The Bush administration, which sent the trade pact to Congress on Tuesday with a message urging swift action, reacted with dismay, saying the congressional move will undermine the credibility of future U.S. trade pacts.
"This was a bipartisan deal," said U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab. "To change the rules in the middle of the game is profoundly unfair." Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez added that threatening the pact would risk losing U.S. jobs. "If Colombia doesn't buy our wheat, they'll buy it from Japan," he said.
But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said she warned the administration not to send the politically sensitive pact to Congress and the White House ignored her advice.
