New NAFTA Deal on Hold Until 2019

President Donald Trump’s new trade deal with Mexico and Canada won’t get a vote in Congress this year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

“My trade advisers says you can’t possibly do it under the various steps that we have to go through. I had not heard that it might be possible to address it this year,” McConnell said in an interview with Bloomberg News Tuesday in Washington.

McConnell said he has not had conversations with the White House about wrapping it up this year. “There’s no question this will be on the top of the agenda” next year, he said.

The White House last month reached a deal with its two closest trading partners to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Trump, when announcing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), praised it as a historic achievement. After 13 months of negotiations and several threats by Trump to withdraw from NAFTA, the U.S. business community and many lawmakers were relieved when the new deal eased uncertainty about trade across the continent.

Some senior Republican senators have been angling for a vote this year if Democrats win back majority control of the House in midterm elections Nov 6. “If the Democrats take the House, the vote will be in the lame duck” session in December, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said this month in an interview.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, however, said last week that it was not a “foregone conclusion” that the agreement will be approved by the Senate and warned that the time frame might be too short to fulfill the required steps that are laid out in U.S. trade law.

America First Policies, a nonprofit group supporting Trump’s policies, on Monday released a television advertisement urging Congress to “pass the USMCA now.”

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, ranking member on the Finance Committee with jurisdiction over trade, warned that it was counterproductive to ram a trade agreement through Congress “at a time of great public frustration with what’s going on with Washington.”

From: Bloomberg

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