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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Well, that's the least charitable way to frame it. A more accurate way to frame 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.

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> 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.

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.

> The US Congress does, really, have line-item authority over regular US laws.

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.

> The US Congress does, really, have line-item authority over regular US laws.

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.

> 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.

The content of both includes and provides for secret extra-national cabals... So that might be where some of the fears come from.

> My real objection to US concern over TPP is that TPP has minimal impact on US domestic law.

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.

I think (or at least hope) the main cause for concern in the US not that it will make the law worse, but that it takes the law out of our hands, so any problems with current law become almost impossible to fix. When there's an over-broad law, it's possible (and sometimes it even actually happens) for Congress to recognize the mistakes in the original law and dial things back a bit. But once it's in a treaty, Hollywood kind of has DC over a barrel.

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