NEW YORK CITY, New York — Donald Trump’s trade adviser Curtis Ellis told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 on Tuesday morning that this election is “a referendum” on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), among other things.
“It is a referendum,” Ellis said in an appearance in studio in midtown Manhattan in a live interview with this reporter and the host of the show Stephen K. Bannon, the Executive Chairman of Breitbart News Network, when asked if the election will decide the fate of the Trans Pacific Partnership.
“If we make it a referendum on the trade policies and TPP, Trump wins,” Ellis said. “Hillary Clinton is trying to make it a referendum on Donald Trump, and she’s trying to make him the issue—his temperament, his this, his that, his hair, whatever—but it really is a referendum on the trade policies because if you want more of the same [vote for Hillary Clinton].”
In other words, a vote for Trump—the GOP nominee for president—is a vote to kill and bury the highly controversial TPP. A vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, is a vote to ensure the success of TPP or something identical to it.
Trump has built his campaign’s success on highlighting the drained American manufacturing sector, where since the Hillary and Bill Clinton championed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada, countless factories across America have shut down and moved overseas. The TPP is expected to be worse than NAFTA, and was originally supported again by Hillary Clinton—who praised it at least 40 times over the years, once even calling it the “gold standard” of trade deals.
While Hillary Clinton now purports to oppose the deal, it is understood that she won’t do anything to stop President Barack Obama from pursuing its final passage in a lame duck session of Congress after the election. Where things stand right now with the TPP is that President Obama has officially notified Congress as of Friday morning of his intent to send a bill to lawmakers that would need to pass Congress to achieve final approval of the Pacific Rim trade pact.
“The White House put Congress on notice Friday morning that it will be sending lawmakers a bill to implement President Barack Obama’s landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement — a move intended to infuse new energy into efforts to ratify the flat-lining trade pact,” Politico wrote last week.
This action by Obama’s administration, Politico wrote, “establishes a 30-day minimum before it can present the legislation.”
Technically speaking, while House Speaker Paul Ryan was forced during his primary election thanks to businessman Paul Nehlen to oppose the deal on a variety of technicalities—a position his office has affirmed he currently stands by—the president moving forward now aggressively could offer up a bunch of what’s called “side agreements” to alleviate Ryan’s and other lawmakers’ trivial concerns. That would prevent the White House from being forced to go back to the 12 member countries to renegotiate significant swaths of the deal, something there is not enough time to do before Obama leaves office.
Politico explained:
Once Congress reviews the draft notification that the White House submitted on Friday, the administration can move forward with sending lawmakers a final statement and the draft of the implementing bill itself. The legislation will describe the actual changes to U.S. law to comply with the rules of the trade agreement. After that, the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees could hold ‘mock markups’ of the bill (because under trade promotion authority, Congress is not actually allowed to tinker with the agreement or its implementing legislation itself, but it can ask the administration to do so). But given the tenor of the elections, the entire process could be pushed into a crowded lame-duck legislation session, which would mean no time for the mock markups. Instead, there could be a lot of deal-making between the White House and congressional leadership to move the bill before Clinton or Trump takes over on Jan. 20.
Currently, President Obama is taking his push for Obamatrade’s centerpiece, the TPP, straight to the public. Politico reported on Tuesday:
President Barack Obama is taking the fight for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to America’s streets — directly countering the fusillades from Donald Trump and, increasingly, from Hillary Clinton. The White House is making an all-out push to win passage of the deal in the lame-duck session of Congress, organizing 30 events over the congressional recess to gin up support for the agreement, considered key to Obama’s strategy to counter China in the Asia-Pacific region. The strategy is to offer support and cover to the small flock of Democrats who supported legislation to fast-track the deal and to remind wavering Republicans that they oppose it at their own peril because of its strong business support.
In Tuesday morning’s Politico trade email, the establishment publication made it even clearer: “President Barack Obama couldn’t care less about Hillary Clinton’s position on the TPP as the White House moves full steam ahead in an effort to lay the groundwork for obtaining support for the controversial trade deal.”
Ultimately, while Clinton’s current position is that she opposes the deal—a position she will unlikely be able to back down from given how hard both Sen. Bernie Sanders and Trump have forced her into this new position against it—ultimately if Clinton wins the election, Obama will likely aim to revive the TPP and force it through in the lame duck session of Congress after the election. If Obama doesn’t succeed in forcing it through in the lame duck, and can’t get it through before Clinton would take office if she wins the election, then it is expected that Clinton would renegotiate small portions of it, rename it, and offer up a very similar transnational globalist trade deal in early 2017.
Therefore, as Ellis laid out on Breitbart News Daily, the only way to ensure the TPP is dead and buried and never coming back is to vote for Donald Trump in November.
“That is the message that will win this election,” Ellis said, before adding: “When he does these big rallies, he spends a good chunk of time talking about the jobs, talking about trade, talking about Carrier [Corporation, an Indiana company that infamously told its employees it is closing down in the U.S. only to reopen in 2017 in Mexico] going to Mexico.”
Ellis said that Trump “is the only man who says that I will withdraw from it if the lame duck passes,” meaning that if Trump is elected president he will pull out of the TPP even if Obama succeeds in passing it during the lame duck session of Congress. Hillary Clinton has not said that, which is he argues [is] proof that she is only “opposed” to it to try to win the election.
LISTEN TO CURTIS ELLIS ON SIRIUSXM PATRIOT 125 ON BREITBART NEWS DAILY:
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