President Obama traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina yesterday for a special conversation with working women, co-hosted with leading women’s sites BlogHer and SheKnows.
The President made clear that more hardworking and middle-class Americans deserve the chance to get ahead. To do this, we need to expand access to child care, make higher education more affordable, cut taxes for middle-class families, and ensure women and men receive equal pay for doing the same job.
| Anthony Carbajal just posted an update on the petition you signed, FDA Grant Accelerated Approval for GM604. | |
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First of all, please watch the Fulginiti Family video. It’s incredibly well done and very powerful: http://ellentube.com/videos/1_71rpj16z Now to address some important… Read more |
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Yesterday, Congress introduced Trade Promotion Authority legislation, also known as TPA or “fast track” — a series of guidelines for trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership the Obama administration is currently working on.
When OFA supporters had the chance to ask one of the President’s closest advisors about the administration’s plans to pursue a progressive trade agreement, we heard a lot of questions about what it would look like, and on the process surrounding how it gets done.
Now that Congress has taken a step forward, it’s time for an update.
Let’s start with the basics: What’s the TPA?
Simply put, it’s how Congress sets the rules of the road for trade negotiations. They set guidelines that the President and the administration use to negotiate an agreement with other nations.
Trade agreements typically take years to negotiate, and though the TPA is often called “fast track,” that’s a bit of a misnomer. TPA is a bill like any other (it must go through both the Senate and the House, and then be signed by the President), and it’s just the first step in a months-long process of public and congressional review before any deal would be voted on. This has been the trade agreement process for decades. In fact, presidents on both sides of the aisle have been relying on Congress to pass versions of the TPA since 1974.
What happens after TPA?
The rules set by Congress through the TPA guide the framework for the final trade agreement — the President’s team will then negotiate the deal on the international stage according to the principles laid out, and if the bill released yesterday is passed, they will bring the finished deal to Congress for an up-or-down vote.
The good news is that this bill ensures progressive values, like enforceable labor and environment standards, will be part of the agreement — and that the entire process is transparent.
Why should people pay attention now?
It’s pretty important for working families and for the economy that we get this right. U.S. exports — supported by expanding trade — have contributed nearly a third of our economic growth in the recovery, supporting more than 11.7 million jobs according to the International Trade Administration, and almost 300,000 small and medium-sized businesses in every state according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Trade agreements are also our best chance to set enforceable labor and environmental protections with new trading partners, instead of letting China set rules that put our workers at a disadvantage.
President Obama has been clear about one big part of this: We can’t repeat mistakes of the past, when workers weren’t well represented. As he said a few weeks ago, “past trade deals haven’t always lived up to the hype. That’s why I’ve made it clear that I won’t sign any agreement that doesn’t put American workers first.”
You can learn more about the President’s approach to crafting a progressive trade agreement, and the process behind the TPA in this blog from the White House:
barackobama.com
You probably have friends who have questions about this, too. Please forward this email along — and stay tuned. We’ll keep you updated on what happens from here.
Thanks — more soon,
Sara
Sara El-Amine
Executive Director
Organizing for Action
Florida is once again in the news for ignoble reasons (and we aren’t talking about this guy). It seemed that the state’s Republican leadership was on track to finally close Florida’s health care coverage gap, and potentially pave the way for movement in other conservative states. By agreeing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, nearly 800,000 working-class Floridians would have got access to health insurance. Unfortunately, conservative ideology has once again gotten in the way of bringing health care to working families.
While Governor Rick Scott (R) had waffled on supporting closing the coverage gap, he came out in support in February 2013. As the former CEO of the country’s largest for-profit hospital company, Scott said that “I cannot, in good conscience, deny the uninsured access to care.” Obama administration officials and the Florida governor were negotiating over details while the Florida Senate unanimously passed a budget that would have closed the coverage gap.
But then, conservative obstructionism made a reappearance. Florida House Republicans stubbornly refused to even entertain a compromise, threatening a kind of rhetorical war against their erstwhile allies in the Senate. Conservative outside groups, like the Florida chapter of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, attacked closing the gap as “Obama’s Medicaid expansion,” despite the support of the Republican Senate president and the Republican governor.
That is, before Governor Scott flip-flopped back to opposing Medicaid expansion, causing the impasse where we are now. Scott has accused the Obama administration of coercing the state to accept federal funding for Medicaid expansion by declining to renew $1 billion in federal funding for another program, which funds hospital care for the uninsured. Put another way, the Obama administration is telling Scott that he should use federal money to offer low-income people health insurance, not just to provide hospital care, and Scott doesn’t like it. (Scott, by the way, has known the funding was set to expire for over a year.) Now, the Florida governor is suing the administration over the issue. Instead of focusing on ensuring that their constituents receive health insurance, Scott and Florida House Republican leadership would rather obstruct and litigate a settled matter.
BOTTOM LINE: In the face of so many facts saying the Affordable Care Act works, why do conservatives continue to lean on the courts to block health care from millions? At the federal level, as we know, conservative efforts in the King v. Burwell case threaten health care for over 8 million Americans. And now in Florida, Governor Rick Scott is also going to the courts in a strained effort to deny health care to hundreds of thousands of his constituents. Real lives are at stake; it is time that we put patients over politics and support the expansion of health care to working Americans.
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