Press Release: How to Build a New U.S. Trade Consensus

"The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority" Provides Unprecedented Historical Review of Trade Authority Since Nation's Founding, and a Path Forward

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 7, 2009

Contact: Ann Eveleth, (202) 454-5108 / Bill Holland, (202) 454-5190

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A new book released today by Public Citizen examines the colorful 220-year U.S. history of how the president and Congress have grappled with negotiating and implementing trade agreements given the constitutional separation of powers requirements. "The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority" by Todd Tucker and Lori Wallach concludes that Fast Track (the most recent mechanism Congress used to delegate its trade powers to the president) is a historical anomaly and counterproductive to the creation of good trade pacts.

"We wrote this book because when we did the research necessary to give ourselves a clear picture of Fast Track and the delegation systems before it, we found distorted, partial and inaccurate information in existing journalistic and scholarly work," said Tucker, research director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division and a co-author of the book. "Much like the conventional wisdom on financial and trade deregulation, the prevailing narrative was that Fast Track was inevitable and necessary for the creation of trade agreements. We show that this is false and that, on the contrary, Americans have frequently changed the way that the executive and legislative branches have shared trade-policy powers."

The book will be released today at an event at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. It will be available in a variety of easily readable formats accessible at FastTrackHistory.org. The research and publication of this material was made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The book explores how the process of designing U.S. trade agreements has changed from 1789 to the present, examining five different regimes of trade-policy formation, the most recent culminating with the expiration of Fast Track during President George W. Bush's second term.

Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress is responsible for crafting trade policy. Yet, over the past few decades, presidents have increasingly grabbed that power through Fast Track, which allows the executive branch to pick negotiating partners, determine trade pacts' contents and even sign the deals – all before Congress gets a vote.

The book also notes that the trade agreements facilitated by Fast Track delve deeply into non-tariff, non-trade areas of policy such as investment, procurement and intellectual property. The book provides an unprecedented documentation of the arguments that motivated both opponents and proponents of the expansion of executive power over trade agreements. It is the result of a three-year scholarly investigation into hundreds of primary and secondary sources, many published in the book for the first time.

The book notes that growing numbers of voters and policymakers – including President Barack Obama and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk – have opposed Fast Track and called for a more democratic process for creating a national globalization strategy.

"We look forward to a future new mechanism that can reduce political tension about trade policy and secure prosperity for the greatest number of Americans, while preserving the vital tenets of American democracy in the era of globalization," said Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division and a co-author of the new book. "Now is the time to have the debate about a new trade model, and this new book provides an essential starting point."