Published Date:
07-Feb-2011
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Now Senator Jon Kyl and his colleagues in the Finance Committee are threatening to block the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which provides income and training for American workers whose employers can’t compete with rising imports. It is due to expire on Feb. 12, and Mr. Kyl and company are refusing to extend it unless the White House promises to advance the long-pending trade deal with Colombia.

We agree that President Obama needs to press Congressional Democrats to approve the agreement without delay. But Senator Kyl’s tactics make no sense (raising questions about his motivations). His obstruction will punish American workers. It will also hurt Colombia.

That’s because Senate Democrats are refusing to support the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act until the trade adjustment bill passes. The preferences, also due to expire on Feb. 12, provide duty-free access to many imports from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru as part of a strategy to combat the cocaine trade by creating jobs in other export industries.

The Andean bill is a core part of the nation’s counternarcotics policy. Support for workers displaced by trade is especially important in an economy in which almost 1 in 10 Americans is out of a job. The Generalized System of Preferences has been an effective foreign policy tool since the mid-1970s, premised on the sensible proposition that poor countries can prosper best from trade.

These programs make so much sense that a bill extending all three passed the House on Dec. 15 on a voice vote, only to founder in the Senate. The Andean preferences and the Trade Adjustment Assistance program were extended until Feb. 12 as a stopgap measure. They will expire unless both the House and the Senate vote to extend them before then.

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama blocked the extension of the G.S.P. altogether because he couldn’t get sleeping bags removed from the program. He was acting on behalf of Exxel Outdoors, a sleeping-bag maker from Haleyville, Ala., that competes against sleeping bags imported duty-free from Bangladesh by CellCorp of Bowling Green, Ky. The Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was pushing to pass the G.S.P. in its entirety, so Mr. Sessions put a hold on the bill.