Little appreciated in the current debate on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is the dramatic way the TPP will abrogate legislative authority permanently from the U.S. Congress to the president. TPP creates a commission with full power to amend the agreement, and an arbitration mechanism with the strength to enforce such amendments. The House and Senate gave up their rights to amend TPP, but they can still vote it down when it comes up for up-or-down votes in both chambers next year.
Although many people still labor under the delusion that TPP is a free trade agreement, the 5,544 page TPP regulates trade, the environment, immigration, patents, copyrights, and labor laws among the 12 countries that are participants and the additional countries that are expected to join. Consequently, in a post-TPP world, U.S. presidents could force almost any alteration in U.S. law simply by achieving support in the TPP commission for a U.S. specific modification to the TPP. Case in point today, Obama’s climate ambitions.
Environmentalists are not happy. Republicans are not happy. Only Obama seems happy. Why is he the only one happy with the climate change agreement that he is currently negotiating in Paris? Because that agreement, when combined with the already-negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), would complete his fundamental transformation of U.S. politics and the U.S. economy.
We don’t yet know the terms of the climate change agreement, but we do know that each country will be held to different carbon emission standards. President Obama released the likely U.S. and Chinese standards in a November 11, 2014, White House press release: