Undecided Dem pushes fast-track addition

Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) is urging House leaders to strengthen rules that would empower the White House to crack down on countries that lower the value of their currency to gain a trading advantage.

Foster, one of more than three dozen Democrats who remain undecided on fast-track legislation, suggested that stricter currency manipulation provisions must be included in the measure to win his support. The bill is scheduled to hit the House floor on Friday.

{mosads}“Given the high barriers U.S. businesses face with many of our trading partners, both through tariffs and other measures, properly negotiated free trade agreements can have a positive impact on good-paying American jobs,” Foster wrote in a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

“However that has not held true for trade agreements involving countries that have continued large-scale currency manipulation,” he wrote.

Chances are slim that House Republican leaders will allow any changes to the measure that passed the Senate last month.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers — led by Reps. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) and Curt Clawson (Fla.) — are offering an amendment that would make currency manipulation provisions a major objective in fast-track for inclusion into free trade agreements, such as the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Kildee said that the amendment “puts teeth” into fast-track “by holding countries who deliberately deflate the value of their currency accountable.”

Offered in the House Rules Committee on Wednesday evening, the House amendment is identical to one offered by Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) that failed in the Senate.

During the Rules hearing, Clawson called undervalued currency a “major barrier to penetrating markets, leave U.S. exporters at a disadvantage.”

Effort to add a framework for currency manipulation into trade agreements is opposed by the White House over concerns that it would scuttle the massive deal that stretches from the Asia-Pacific to Latin America.

But Foster said he’s convinced it is possible to craft a definition of currency manipulation — such as the one used by the International Monetary Fund — that, “together with mandatory and enforceable sanctions, would allow legitimate management of the any nation’s monetary policy, including quantitative easing, while prohibiting currency manipulation on the scale that has caused massive damage to U.S. industry in the past.”

“Confidence that the [bill] directs the administration to secure meaningful rules on currency manipulation is crucial to building the support necessary for broad bipartisan passage of the bill,” Foster said.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who is the chief House author of fast-track, doesn’t want to alter the legislation that was passed in the Senate before the Memorial Day recess.

Besides Kildee and Clawson, 20 other lawmakers have signed onto the currency amendment.

This story was updated on June 11 at 11:10 a.m.