Food Safety Concerns Are Out Front as TPA “Fast Track” Moves Through Congress
The Senate has moved Trade Promotion Authority one step closer to becoming law this week, but as the fight over so-called “fast track” trade legislation shifts to the House of Representatives, opponents are increasingly pointing to a recent World Trade Organization ruling on meat labeling as a warning of what’s really at stake.
A Canary in the Coal Mine
TPA, if enacted, would set up a framework allowing the president to sign trade deals with other countries — including the sprawling, then-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership — that Congress could only approve or reject in a single up-or-down vote, without the ability to amend any individual provision. For Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a recent World Trade Organization arbitration decision striking down the United States’ country-of-origin meat labeling program isn’t a side issue disconnected from that fight — it’s a preview of exactly the kind of consumer protection loss fast-track trade deals can produce. Some members of Congress have pushed back on that framing, arguing the labeling dispute has little to do with food safety and even less to do with TPA specifically. But for DeLauro and allied consumer advocates, the WTO’s willingness to strike down a popular, bipartisan-backed labeling law over trade objections is precisely the “canary in a coal mine” moment critics have been warning about for years.
A Coalition That Cuts Across Party Lines
The fight over TPA and TPP has scrambled Washington’s usual partisan alignments in the process. Many Republicans have sided with President Obama in supporting fast-track authority, while a large bloc of Democrats — including progressive senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Sherrod Brown — have led the opposition. Warren has been particularly outspoken, co-authoring an op-ed with DeLauro warning that “powerful corporate interests have spent a lot of time and money trying to bend Washington’s rules to benefit themselves,” and arguing corporations helped write a deal the public isn’t even permitted to see before Congress votes on fast-tracking it, according to Americas Quarterly’s coverage of the fight’s early votes.
That progressive opposition appeared to weaken in the days leading up to the Senate’s cloture vote, as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell worked to peel off enough votes to advance the bill before the Memorial Day recess. The Senate ultimately passed TPA on May 22 by a vote of 62-37, incorporated into H.R. 1314, according to detailed legislative tracking from the Congressional Research Service — clearing the Senate but leaving the more uncertain fight in the House still ahead.
Labor Groups Broaden the Critique Beyond Food Safety
Food safety and country-of-origin labeling were far from the only concerns organized labor raised about the bill. The AFL-CIO, in a formal letter urging senators to oppose the legislation, argued that fast-track authority would let the executive branch negotiate trade deals “in secret and out of public view” through as late as 2018, with no meaningful accountability mechanism to prevent further erosion of “worker rights, environmental protections, access to affordable medicines, food safety rules, and other vital protections for working families,” according to the union federation’s own letter to lawmakers. The letter tied that critique directly to the closure of more than 60,000 U.S. factories since 2000, framing TPA not as an abstract procedural question but as a continuation of trade policies labor groups blame for decades of manufacturing job losses.
A House Fight Still to Come
With the Senate vote secured, the battle over TPA was always expected to shift to the House, where the bill faced real uncertainty. Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, among the fast-track bill’s most vocal House opponents, said reading the actual text of the underlying TPP proposal — portions of which she had been permitted to review under strict confidentiality rules — had only deepened her concerns rather than eased them, and vowed to keep working to defeat the measure in the House, according to a statement from her office.
That House fight would ultimately resolve differently than Schakowsky hoped: TPA passed the House by a narrow margin the following month, and President Obama signed it into law on June 29, 2015 — clearing the procedural path that allowed the full Trans-Pacific Partnership text to be finalized and eventually released to the public that November.
For related coverage of the TPP fight, see our piece on the full TPP text’s release and what it revealed, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.