Robert Novak reports on how Democrats in Congress are ready to humiliate America’s strongest ally in Latin America, Colombia, in order to mollify the Big Labor Bosses . President Bush will next week send to Congress for approval the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, the product of intense negotiation that met many of the objections of Democrats in Congress on labor and environmental issues. Indeed, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said she is willing to go even further by adding provisions to help workers displaced by trade. It is still not enough for Big Labor, and this has put House Democrats in a quandary. Reports Novak:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not want to make her members cast votes on the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. It is unconditionally opposed by the AFL-CIO, which is uninterested in negotiating changes. But to forget about a vote this year as Pelosi wants would be akin to an outright rejection in its international implications. It would humiliate Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a free-trader and a bulwark against the spreading influence in Latin America of Venezuela's leftist strongman President Hugo Chavez.
The difficulty in getting only about 30 House Democrats to provide the needed margin of victory reflects the Democratic Party's abandonment of free trade over the past half-century. Less obvious, labor's intense opposition shows that the AFL-CIO no longer leads the way against the far left throughout the world, as it did under George Meany and Lane Kirkland in bygone years. Their successors are not concerned with the prospect of Chavez, allied with communist Cuba, dominating the Western Hemisphere.
Poor Nancy Pelosi, having to choose between doing what’s right by her country or doing what’s right by Big Labor – which happens to be the single largest contributor to Democratic politicians and which is poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to elect liberal Democrats this election cycle. Calvin Coolidge once defined patriotism as “looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.” That’s something we hope the Democratic majority will keep in mind as the Colombia FTA debate moves forward.
Joe Eule |