White House pushes Congress to prioritize passing free trade deals

Passing three pending free-trade deals remains a top priority for the White House and congressional leaders as competing interests nudge their way onto the September agenda.

President Obama is vowing to provide a weekly list of new bills he wants Congress to consider, including a payroll tax cut and an extension of federal emergency unemployment benefits, while pressure rises to complete work on the long-delayed trade deals with Colombia, South Korea and Panama.

{mosads}”Over the coming weeks, I’m going to be putting out more proposals, week by week, that will help businesses hire and put people back to work,” Obama said during a Thursday speech in Michigan.

He called for a final agreement on moving the trade deals forward — the White House and Senate and House leaders are working on the last details on a process to pass the three accords as well as a worker-assistance program.

“I want to see billions of dollars’ more products sold around the world stamped with three words: Made in America,” he said.

“Those trade bills are teed up,” he said. “They’re ready to go. Let’s get it done.”

House and Senate Republicans and some Democrats couldn’t agree more.

One senior Senate Republican aide said “we’ve been calling on the White House to send them up so we could act on them, literally, for years.”

A House aide suggested that the Obama administration send the agreements to Capitol Hill.

“The president highlighted the agreements yesterday in his speech in Michigan, noting that they are teed up, and he called on Congress to pass them because they create jobs,” the aide said.” Our Members agree, but the problem is that the president has not sent them to Congress, and we can’t act until he does.”

The process hasn’t exactly been easy. The Obama administration made changes to all three agreements and both parties have brokered back and forth on other items such as the White House demand to pass Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) along with all three accords.

Despite the sense of urgency from all sides, the legislative agenda is filling with other high-priority issues such as passage of a stop-gap measure for the fiscal year 2012 budget that must be done by Oct. 1. Those negotiations could push off the trade deals until October.

The House is only expected to be in session for 11 days in September and the Senate for 14, another reason why the trade deals may have to wait another month or two.

In addition, the administration is pressing for another extension of federal unemployment benefits, a fight that consumed lawmakers last year until they agreed to include a yearlong extension into an $858 billion tax-cut package signed by Obama in December.

Still, advocates for another year of the extended benefits will go into full-court press mode as soon as Congress returns after Labor Day.

Judy Conti, federal advocacy coordinator with the National Employment Law Project, said her group will urge members to extend federal benefits because of the persistently high rate of unemployment along with the stagnating economy.

She said a short-term extension shouldn’t be in the mix because “this Congress struggles so mightily to get anything done” that anything less than a year will take up too much time.

How and when an extension would go through Congress — whether as part of a larger bill and what offsets will be used to pay for the measure — could take some time to be determined.

But Conti is clear that a bill must be done this year and advocates they will “fight for it.”

She acknowledged the new dynamic among House Republicans could make the path even harder and said while the bill must be paid for, the offsets should be far enough out so it “doesn’t offset the stimulative benefits.”

Meanwhile, the president is pressing for Congress to extend the payroll tax saying “he would sign that bill today if it came to my desk” and is urging passage of an infrastructure bill, an overhaul of the patent system and a bill to help veterans find jobs when they return home.