By the time this is in its final form, many countries (like the US) would have basically already voted for approval, meaning a public debate will be too late and all but meaningless.
This is not how negotiations work. You don't make preliminary talks public. Many of the things in those talks are outrageous and no one believes they will be in the final draft. It's how you negotiate. You ask for X, then the opposing side tells you no, BUT if you manage to do Y, then we can do a scaled back version of X. You tell them no, BUT if they do X and Z, you will make Y happen. All sides make concessions and sh... stuff gets done.
Making the above process public will tie the negotiators hands.
And seen another way. If any majority of people inside a democracy does not want to have a feature it is the politicians job to listen to the people and do their bidding. Politicians are there to server the people not to rule them.
The people negotiating on my behalf are so far removed from my actual vote, that I could not possible call this democratic.
So no, when the final draft is released, we will have the european parliament get some short amount of time (easily too short to really grasp implications), no real debate, but a fast vote. Then this will have to be implemented into national laws (without another parliamentarian debate on a national basis).
Let's see, what you have to say then in regards to this process.
What is left to say?
I now see how you do "discourse" and can understand why you do not fear TTIP "discourse". As yours and the so called "discourse" are equally non existent and on the same level.
Please. I beg you to refrain from an answer, as I write this just for the afterworld. I do not try to feed you, the troll.
And just FYI, this style of "discourse" is exactly the reason why TTIP negotiations should not be made public. A politician can rip apart through all the logic here and the public will eat it up.
Einstein's words, not mine.
What a sad world you live in.
In any case, you are making a fallacious argument from authority. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#Appeal... :
> A common example of the fallacy is appealing to an authority in one subject to pontificate on another - for example citing Albert Einstein as an authority on religion when his expertise was in physics.
I quoted it because it sums my thesis pretty well. People are very, very stupid. You cannot count on them not being swayed by some pretty words and blowing the whole treaty out of the water with some misguided protests.
Perhaps if you frequent HN, you don't know how stupid people are, because you only talk to the the smartest 10%.
People being stupid (short-sighted, narrow-minded, self-centered, ignorant) includes people in power. If you're not a fan of democracy, you should just say so rather than dance around it.
You mean it's not how oligarchs want it to work. Proponents of unpopular policy proposals want to govern people, but they don't want to have to explain themselves to the people they propose to govern.
>You don't make preliminary talks public.
Just because it doesn't always happen, does not mean that it never happens, shouldn't happen, or can't happen.
>Making the above process public will tie the negotiators hands.
Which is the point of democratic processes. It is exactly what people want. I'm not sure what they're worried about anyway, in the US the proletariat has been convinced to go along with all manner of political and economic policy that goes against their best interests; they beg for more of it.
* The United States Congress does not really get line-item veto on giant international trade agreements that affect dozens of countries, all of whom also must ratify the treaty.
* Trade promotion authority is simply the authorization for the administration to negotiate the treaty.
* By the time TPP is ratified by Congress at the end of 2016, it will have been public for over a year, and we'll have change-bars for the "legal scrub" stuff Techdirt is so worried about.
My real objection to US concern over TPP is that TPP has minimal impact on US domestic law. If you're a New Zealander, or, worse, Vietnamese, I totally understand how the TPP is problematic. The idea that a treaty that mostly serves to normalize global trade rules around the ones already in place in the US has been "rammed through in the USA" seems pretty arrogant to me.
Its not a treaty. If it were a treaty, it would have to be ratified by a 2/3 vote in the Senate, and could, indeed, not be modified on a line-item level. What is put before Congress is a regular US law, not a treaty ratification, that needs a mere majority, but in both houses, and which just happens to be intended to implement an non-treaty agreement negotiated by the executive.
The US Congress does, really, have line-item authority over regular US laws.
> Trade promotion authority is simply the authorization for the administration to negotiate the treaty.
No, its not. Its a (without binding effect, since Constitutionally the Congress cannot bind its own future actions) commitment as to how Congress will apply its powers after such negotiations. The power to negotiate with foreign powers and submit whatever it wants to the Congress after such negotiations is inherent executive power that requires no authorization.
I don't think legality was the issue. The issue is that there are dozens of countries that need to vote on the same exact text for it to have an effect.
Surely the US Congress could modify it but then the other players will at best ratify a different version and at worse change items here and there themselves.
In both cases, what you get is not an international trade agrement. You may as well vote "no" or not even try to negotiate a deal.
Right, which is the exact point of this whole tiresome conversation about negotiations.
People who don't want TPP (or TTIP) to become law have figured out that it's easier to attack the process than to attack the substance[1], and the outcome would be the same.
[1] Not because the substance is unassailable, but because talking about it requires informing the listener, whereas invoking fears of secret cabals does not.
Except that, in this case, only if they first vote to change their own rules, which were set when TPA was passed. So they dig themselves a small hole, which they can jump out of without help. Nothing unconstitutional about that. Congressional-Executive Agreements are a pragmatic solution to a coordination problem, using constitutionally provided tools to solve a problem whose complexity was not envisaged by the authors.
Fun fact: the U.S. avoids entering into treaties which override our laws, despite explicit constitutional language which says that they would. Best to change laws by statute, so everyone is clear, and everyone doesn't have to do a bunch of supremacy analysis. We'll even pass implementing legislation for treaties that in other nations are self-executing.
That is a mischaracterization. There is plenty in the TPP that sucks if you are a citizen of the US as opposed to a corporation.
Many people in the US are trying desperately to stop the TPP. We simply don't have a lot of voice.
In the UK, for example, our national laws go through several stages of development in Parliament. Over the course of many months or years there will often be thousands of comments contributed by MPs, Lords, civil servants, independent subject matter experts, special interest groups, and the general public.
There are no draconian restrictions on seeing or discussing the work in progress of the kind we're talking about here. No-one is wearing tin foil hats. No-one is spending their entire working lifetime fending off crazy theories from everyone with half a clue.
And yet, as you say, stuff still gets done.
Discussions in the UN about issues as big as imposing sanctions or going to war have taken place with more transparency than we're seeing here. National politicians who have defied public opinion on such matters have sometimes paid a heavy price for it at the next elections.
I mean, seriously, we're talking about a bilateral trade deal here, not the fate of humanity. Yes, each party has some internal political structure and local variations, but the point of both the EU and the US is to have regulated, harmonious local variations so the whole can still function effectively.
Please tell me, if everything is above board, what is so secret about this kind of a deal that it justifies obstructing not only the public but their elected representatives from watching it develop? For that matter, why should those elected representatives not then block the entire thing on principle, if they are only to be asked to rubber stamp the results without substantial scrutiny or a meaningful opportunity to actually represent the interests of their electorates?
Also, this is getting very tiresome. Representatives have enough time to familiarize themselves with the draft and decide what to vote. This whole "the secret cabal is making treaties without you" is nothing more than sensationalist FUD. Only the negotiations are in secret. As they should be.
I'm not even sure what your point is any more. Looking through your comments in this thread, your argument appears to be that negotiations on international agreements must happen in secret, because reasons.
Representatives have enough time to familiarize themselves with the draft and decide what to vote.
We've already seen procedural technicalities used to set up end-runs around proper scrutiny by elected representatives, in the context of international agreements in the recent past. This has been done both in the US and the EU.
Even if those elected representatives do have ample time for scrutiny, if they have no meaningful opportunity to actually represent their electorates by advocating substantial changes as appropriate, the scrutiny is of very little value.
True or false? "When they are called on to scrutinise and approve TTIP, the directly elected representatives of people in the US and the EU member states will have available to them an effective mechanism to change the substance of the proposal in areas they do not believe to be in the interests of those they represent."
One reasonable process might be having each country send their appointed representatives to negotiate initially, then bringing back a first attempt at consensus for proper and open scrutiny by national authorities. Then you send your delegates back to attempt to resolve any show-stopping issues and prepare final wording. Finally you ask each country's national government to ratify the final agreement. If really necessary, the national scrutiny/delegate negotiations cycle can be repeated first, though if that is happening it suggests the attempted scope of the agreement is too broad to be practical.
This way you would have a chance for people who were actually elected to influence the outcome usefully, without resorting to ongoing line-by-line revisions by thousands of individual MP, MEPs, US senators, etc. You just have to recognise that your delegated negotiators are not sent with the authority to make major policy decisions but only to reach a consensus that all parties can accept on areas where you are already broadly in agreement.
If they aren't able to do that, such that they can come back with a proposal that each country can clearly favour overall with no deal-breaking terms, then again they probably shouldn't have been trying to form such a complicated agreement about such controversial areas between so many different parties in the first place.
Are you absolutely sure that you know how the current process works? Or you just read some articles here and there and concocted the story in your head?
I don't know, and I don't think you do either, because it was done in secret with no open, democratic debate. You can tell this from the fact that many elected representatives who participate in the normal democratic processes are among those complaining about a lack of access.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm a little surprised that the out campaign hasn't made more of TTIP itself as a textbook example of the democratic deficit they complain about. Various people in reply have pointed out that the current UK administration would seem likely to support a similar trade deal with the US directly anyway and in practice it may be other EU states putting the brakes on parts of TTIP, so possibly raising the issue would backfire.
Perhaps to some extent (and, being a citizen of neither the UK nor any other EU state, I really don't have much invested in the Brexit debate), though the situation with the EU -- which has directly accountable organs and many of the same kinds of accountability and transparency provisions that are common in national government -- seems different (in general, more like the US federal/state situation, where overlapping powers mean that there are multiple levels at which an interested party can attempt to achieve the same kind of goal and the can, to an extent, forum-shop for the most friendly authority, but still be subject to the same general type of exposure through the legislative process, even if the details are different at different levels.)
There's probably also an argument that without the EU, more of Britain's affairs would be subject to topic-specific, specially-negotiated-through-opaque-process, deals.
MEPs do have some real power, particularly since the Lisbon Treaty, but in practice that power is often like a veto: they can decline to approve some pretty big deals, but unless there is a credible risk of throwing something out in its entirety, MEPs don't necessarily get much input into the details.
At the moment, it looks like TTIP may be one of those cases. MEPs, and very recently some of the national equivalents, have only been given access to the current proposed text at all if they agreed to very restrictive conditions. Everything else is being done by people who aren't directly accountable to the public, and in most cases aren't even readily identifiable.
This is one of the reasons critics of TTIP will advocate striking the whole thing down. Some really do think it should be thrown out on principle as an affront to democracy, but others are playing a more strategic game, knowing that if the European Parliament starts to look like it actually might flex its muscles in that way, those promoting TTIP will be forced to open it up to full MEP scrutiny and get them back on side before there is any chance of the deal being successful.
Its interesting that that would be controversial about the EU -- isn't that true of many national governments within the EU (most certainly including the UK) -- as well, that the only directly-elected body at the level of the national government is the Parliament, and there are all kinds of other powerful offices and bodies, and the people in those offices and bodies are all appointed in various ways, being only indirectly accountable to the citizenry?
I'd say at least for the UK the main difference is that there is still a real prospect of holding the appointed parts of the government to account at the next election. Technically, we elect local MPs, with all the usual objections about first past the post. In reality, the party a prospective MP represents is the dominant factor in who wins, except in a few rare cases with perhaps an overriding local issue or protest vote. Consequently the PM (the first indirectly appointed role, normally determined by who can command majority support in Parliament) and government ministers (the next tier, effectively appointed by the PM) are still strongly accountable to the electorate in practice. If they do unpopular things, the MPs from whom the administration as a whole derives its power, and most of the officials as MPs themselves, will face the consequences at the next election. (This doesn't apply to the same extent for government ministers who are Lords rather than MPs, but appointments to the entirely undemocratic House of Lords is a whole issue in itself.)
This is quite different to the executive of the EU, where Commissioners sent by member states are infamously often failed but high profile national politicians who are either being given a pat on the back by a friendly administration or shipped out of the way for a while because they're too dangerous to keep around back home. Which mandate each Commissioner is given then depends on the President of the Commission, who in turn is decided through such a complicated process that I won't even try to describe it here. If you as a citizen don't like the way an incumbent European Commissioner is handling their brief, there is no real prospect of influencing them to change it. Even in the face of overwhelming public opposition to some policy, by the time the people have voted to change the balance of power in enough places that either the Commissioner is no longer appointed by their home state or the European Parliament can bring down a Commission, the term of office would probably be up anyway.
By the time a law arrives at the first public comment stage, even in the UK, it has already been the subject of a lot of conversation and negotiation behind closed doors. MPs do not have cameras in their offices and public file servers. Bills introduced for consideration do not spring fully-formed from the forehead of one MP, surprising everyone around them. They are talked about at length before even being drafted.
Indeed, they just don't want us little folks to disturb their dealings.
They say it's a free trade deal of sorts, but actual free trade could be arranged overnight: just stop intervening in trade, and it will be free.
I get the feeling that the tone on HN has changed a bit. Are intelligent people finally waking up to doubt their "representatives'" or governments' good intentions?
It's difficult to see how they could make it any clearer that they're working against our interests. Going full police state on us would do it, but there's not much room in between.