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Portman: Dems distorting my trade deal position
YOUNGSTOWN
U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Cincinnati, said Democrats are trying to confuse voters by making it sound like he has refused to read what would be the nation’s largest trade agreement and has already voted for it.
The reality, he said Thursday during a 70-minute interview with The Vindicator, is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement language isn’t finished and a vote on it may not be cast until next year at the earliest.
Portman was responding to an Aug. 3 Vindicator article in which he acknowledged he wouldn’t review a draft of the TPP proposal because of its secrecy. His main objection was Democrats tied TPP with a June 24 vote by the U.S. Senate to give the president fast-track authority on trade deals.
Calling that “political propaganda,” Portman said, “Democrats have done a really good job of blurring that line” between TPP and fast track.
Fast track, also called trade promotion authority (TPA), allows the president to give such deals to Congress for only yes-or-no votes without the power to amend them. The vote passed 60-38 with Portman siding with the majority.
“TPP has nothing to do with” fast track,” he said. “They’re totally separate.”
But Portman, a former U.S. trade representative, also said allowing members of Congress to look at the draft was an effort to get them to support fast track.
“Let me be honest with you, the reason they did it was to get votes for TPA, and it has nothing to do with TPA,” he said.
The senator changed course Thursday saying that because TPA passed, “I’m not against looking at” the TPP draft. Portman, however, made the original statements about not looking at the draft more than a month after the Senate voted in favor of fast track.
“It is a draft of some parts of what they might negotiate,” he said. “I’m happy to look at that.”
Portman added: “I objected to this being done secretly. Now that [fast track] passed, I’m willing to look at it.”
When the TPP proposal is finished, Portman said he’d “go over it with a fine-tooth comb,” and he’s “going to look at every single sentence, every word, every part of that agreement.”
Portman said he helped get passed legislation that allows a 60-day review period on all potential trade agreements before a vote, and he would have plenty of time to examine any trade deal before deciding whether to support it.
If approved by Congress, TPP would be the nation’s largest trade agreement and include 11 other countries.
In response, Kirstin Alvanitakis, an Ohio Democratic Party spokeswoman, said: “Who does Sen. Portman think he’s fooling? He had an opportunity [to look at TPP draft] when fast-track authority was being considered, and he gave up his power. He surrendered that authority and now isn’t against looking at it.”
She added: “There are no take-backs in the U.S. Senate. He had a chance to do his job and he blew it.”
Also, Portman said he is working hard to grow the Youngstown Air Reserve Station in Vienna and fend off any possible attempts to close it or other military bases in Ohio.
Portman helped obtain $9.4 million in federal funding for a new state-of-the-art indoor firing range at the local base.
If the federal government is going to look at closing military facilities in a process known as Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), that wouldn’t occur until 2018 at the earliest and is more likely to be considered in 2019 or 2020, he said.
“You have to be concerned about BRAC, but the air base is well-positioned to withstand it,” he said.
Portman said he’d like to replace C-130H aircraft at the base with next-generation C-130J planes, but it’s unlikely those would go to reserve bases. But he said he wants to modernize the C-130H planes and have more money invested at the base in infrastructure, something that has occurred in the past few years.
Before meeting with The Vindicator, Portman had a roundtable with local businessmen at General Extrusions Inc. in Boardman. The stops in the Mahoning Valley are part of Portman’s 13-county, five-day Jobs Tour that started Monday.