House GOP eyeing new strategy for trade vote

House GOP leaders are considering holding a vote as early as this week on a stand-alone bill granting President Obama fast-track trade authority, a senior leadership source said.

The legislation would not include Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a program that provides billions in funding for American workers harmed by trade. Free trade foes thwarted renewal of TAA last week in a bid to kill fast-track.

{mosads}GOP leaders demonstrated on Friday they have enough support to pass the stand-along fast-track bill known as trade promotion authority (TPA), which would allow Obama to send Congress a major Pacific trade deal for an up-or-down vote without amendments.

The House passed TPA on a narrow 219-211 vote, with 28 Democrats backing the measure. But it was not sent to Obama because of a procedural rule that required TAA to pass as well.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the majority of House Democrats voted to defeat the workers training bill in a bid to defeat the fast-track bill — a move that denied the Democratic president and GOP leaders a key victory on trade.

Obama and GOP leaders have been unable to secure an additional 85 votes needed to pass the workers aid bill.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Obama have spoken “several” times in recent days on how to move TPA forward, Boehner said.

Passing the TPA stand-alone bill in the House would decouple the legislation from the aid bill, kicking the trade issue back to the Senate, which last month passed a trade bill that included both TPA and TAA.

“We didn’t create this mess,” the senior leadership source told The Hill. Voting on a stand-alone TPA bill “would be the most likely scenario.”

“It would then require the Senate to figure out what to do with TAA later,” the source said. “Clearly they felt like putting the two together added votes in the Senate. On this side of the Capitol, we found that adding it in there subtracted votes.”

“I remain optimistic we can get something done,” the source said.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Tuesday said the White House strongly supports the worker aid program, but didn’t rule out accepting fast-track legislation without it.

“At this point, I don’t want to go into the legislative options being discussed,” Earnest said.

“There are some that have been proposed that are non-starters in the view of the White House. But rather than shooting down all the bad ideas, we will allow those conversations to take place. Once we have a more coherent plan to present about the legislative path forward, then that’s something we can discuss in more detail.”

— This story was updated at 3:46 p.m. Jordan Fabian contributed.