Will the GOP Capitulate Again?
“Free trade results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations,” warned the Republican Senator from Ohio and future President William McKinley in 1892.
“Thank God I am not a free-trader,” echoed the rising Empire State Republican and future President Theodore Roosevelt.
Those were the voices of a Republican Party that believed in prospering America first.
For a quarter century, however, the party of the Bushes has been a globalist, New World Order party, and fanatically free trade.
It signed on to NAFTA, GATT, the World Trade Organization, most-favored-nation status for China, CAFTA, and KORUS, the U.S.-Korean trade treaty negotiated by Barack Obama.
So supportive have Republicans been of anything sold as free trade they have agreed to “fast track,” the voluntary surrender by Congress of its constitutional power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”
With fast track, Congress gives up its right to amend trade treaties, and agrees to restrict itself to a yea or nay vote.
And who is leading the fight to have Congress again surrender its power over trade? The GOP vice presidential nominee, and current chairman of ways and means, Paul Ryan.
Yet when one looks back on the devastation wrought by free trade, how can a party that purports to put America first sign on to fast track yet again?
In the first decade of this century, the United States lost 5 to 6 million manufacturing jobs. We lost 55,000 factories, a devastation of industry not unlike what we inflicted on Germany and Japan in 1944-45. ...
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