The first thing that you need to realize is that no bad zombie idea in D.C. is dead no matter how many stakes you put through its heart and how much garlic and sunlight you expose it to if the Very Serious People have endorsed it.
But in a bit of encourging news time marches on and in this case to the benefit of normal folks like you and I.
Clearly there are not the votes to pass TPP (very bad zombie idea) and so they have done what they always do and extended the deadline. The problem with that strategy in this case is that the other 12 nations are not dopes and they realize that if debate is extended through August (as seems entirely likely at this point) it will be consumed by the 2016 election cycle which would normally be the occasion for a Friday news dump distraction but under the current conditions will probably result in awkward, populist questions for the candidates.
Delay is defeat. At least we hope so.
But the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and remember what I said about bad zombie ideas. Next up, entitlement “reform” (that seems such a good thing, why didn’t we do that?).
GOP On Trade Deal: ‘No One Will Be Negotiating With Leader Pelosi On A Path Forward’
Ryan Grim and Jennifer Bendery, Huffington Post
Posted: 06/16/2015
For now, House Republican leaders simply don’t have the votes to pass the trade package and need more time to find them. They plan to take a procedural vote on Tuesday to give themselves until July 30 to come up with a way forward.
…
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters on Tuesday that the vote was punted because the support isn’t there.“Most of the discussion that occurred in the last few days had to do with cobbling together enough votes for TAA. I never thought that was going to be a very successful effort, and I think it proved not to be. So … it has now been abandoned, essentially,” he said, according to a transcript of his remarks that was provided to HuffPost.
“The thought was if we could cobble together the votes to get enough [for] TAA that they would vote for it, and then send TAA and TPA to the president,” Hoyer continued. “But, I mean, that clearly ‑‑ I never thought that was going to work. And I think clearly they have concluded it wasn’t going to work because they couldn’t get sufficient votes from the Republicans. I don’t think they are going to get a lot of Democrats to change on TAA. There were 40 of us that voted for TAA, which meant the Republicans would have needed 100 and what, 78? And I don’t think there are 178 votes on the Republican side, as we saw, to vote for TAA.”
“It gives the Republicans time to figure out what they’re going to do,” Hoyer said of extending the vote deadline to July 30.
Great minds and so do ours.
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