Paul Nehlen, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s challenger in the 2016 Wisconsin primary, joined SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the possibility that President Obama will push the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (dubbed “ObamaTrade” by critics) through the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress.
Nehlen credited Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy with increasing Republican resistance to the deal.
“Since 2015, just before Mr. Trump began his campaign, the percentage of Republican and Republican-leaning voters with negative views of trade pacts increased 22 percentage points, to 61 percent,” Nehlen noted. “Just last week, Patrick Toomey, a Republican fighting for re-election in Pennsylvania, he announced he had switched against TPP, following Tim Kaine of Virginia, aligned with Hillary Clinton, obviously as running mate.”
“So the 60 senators who have supported fast-track last year, at least five now came out against it, and it’ll need at least fifty votes. Not unlike Obamacare, this ObamaTrade is gonna need every vote possible,” he predicted. “Hillary says she’s opposed to it, but that’s exactly how we know she is still for it. She will pass it if she wins in November.”
Said Nehlen:
So Barack Obama, he isn’t gonna wait. He isn’t gonna do a public tour to pass TPP in the lame duck. He is going to hide behind the scenes, wait with the owners of the purse strings, who will deliver campaign donations to his henchmen in Congress. He’ll have closed-door meetings with the dark forces behind selling out the American worker. He won’t go on CNN or ABC and make the case for TPP during the lame duck. He’ll use it as a threat of campaign funding from the big-money supporters of TPP, to get votes in the House and Senate.
“That is the cruel nature, the true nature of politics,” he lamented. “It’s not a sales campaign. It’s brute force. They’re going to attempt to ram this down the throats of the American people, just like they did Obamacare. And I’ll tell you,” he said, “I’ll tell your listeners, be on the lookout for the likes of, like the Cornhusker Kickback or the Louisiana Purchase, that we saw with Obamacare. You’re gonna see the same blueprint, more or less, of how they’ll pass TPP in the lame duck.”
“With Obamacare, you saw all those sweetheart carve-outs going to Democrat-run states, states represented by Democrats in the Senate under Harry Reid,” he recalled. “But now you’ve got a GOP House and Senate. It’s going to be so interesting to see what McConnell and Paul Ryan do, to negotiate for their states and for key states in the areas where Obama’s going to need votes.”
Nehlen warned:
But I’ll tell you, I don’t think there’s any question how this is going to go down. Obama will offer the GOP leadership taxpayer dollars to pass TPP, and some of them will cave, and they’ll take that TPP taxpayer-funded bribe, in exchange for selling their own constituents’ futures across the Pacific to Asia.
He vowed to “work every day, between now and the end of the year, to make sure that that doesn’t happen” because, he said, “We know it gives up U.S. sovereignty.”
He called ObamaTrade “the worst imaginable form of trade deal,” forcing America to deal with “countries that use slave labor.”
“Think about that. How do you even compete with slave labor?” Nehlen wondered, adding:
These countries together don’t represent the size of the American GDP. Our Gross Domestic Product is over $17 trillion. You compare that somebody like Brunei. … If you were to compare two balls, one an exercise ball that you can sit on and do sit-ups on, the size of Brunei’s would be the size of a Skittle. That’s the difference in size we’re talking about; but both countries will have one vote. It’s mind-boggling that these guys would sell America the way they are, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
Boyle noted that Hillary Clinton, once an outspoken supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, has lately been claiming to oppose it. He suggested Clinton could demonstrate her sincerity by publicly calling on Obama not to pass it during the lame duck session, a suggestion Nehlen called “brilliant.”
Nehlen said:
All the Democrats, all the Republicans – she should be calling out both sides of the aisle. If she’s going to demonstrate that she cares about this country – which I think, at this point, would be a moot argument – but if she were to do that, if she were to come out and say to everybody, everybody has got to stop campaigning against this, we cannot possibly have this, this thing’s gotta be scrapped, and we’ve got to do bilateral trade agreements, I would be shocked.
Nehlen contended:
I think most people would be shocked. But that is the right thing to do. She won’t do it, but she ought to say that. She ought to say, “I am only for bilateral trade agreements because we’ll use the strength of the U.S. in those trade agreements. We are the market.” And that’s what you hear Donald Trump saying because that’s the smart argument.
“The smart argument is: we are the market. Why would we give people access? Why would we give them one vote equal to ours, when they’ve got a Skittle-sized market?” asked Nehlen. “They’ve got gabs of people, gabs and gabs of humans, so how does this make sense? It only makes sense if you’re thinking, well, we’ll send the jobs over to those people, and they work for next to nothing,” he said.
“All of a sudden, we get more things streaming into the United States. This trade deal makes it legal to bring your employees over here. We’ll have Chinese, Vietnamese business owners buying businesses in the United States,” he anticipated, adding that “it’ll suddenly become even more profitable for them to buy American companies because they’ll be able to bring their workers here and pay their workers the same amount as the wages they pay in other countries.”
“Think about that for a minute. It’s frightening. That’s why it’s such an insidious trade deal, and I’ve worked so hard, my team worked so hard, against this thing, and we continue to work against it,” he promised.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/breitbart-news-daily-paul-nehlen-august-30-2016
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