Five years of data exclusivity for biologics, an end to panel blocking and undefined "mechanisms and resources" to monitor and enforce labor and environmental laws in Mexico are the core of what the House Democrats have asked the Trump administration to change in its NAFTA rewrite. The House Democrats' working group revealed more of what it is asking for in a report sent to the Speaker's office and released publicly July 26. In that report, they wrote, "It is time for the administration to present its proposals and to show its commitment to passing the new NAFTA... ."
toSearch Primer
Term list: Separate terms with spaces, not commas or semicolons.
Multi-word term: Place inside quotes to ensure an exact match (e.g. "surrogate value").
Acronyms: Use all capital letters to ensure the search is not looking for that letter sequence instead. (e.g., CIT).
Required term: If a term must be included in any resulting articles, prefix it with a plus sign (e.g., CBP +ruling).
Excluded term: If a term should be excluded from any articles being found, prefix it with a minus sign (e.g., ruling -NY).
Simplest form: Use the simplest form of a term (e.g. "russian export control" instead of "russian export controls") or "entity list" instead of "entity listing" or "entity listed").
Of the 10 Congress members who traveled to Mexico last weekend to evaluate the NAFTA rewrite as part of a congressional delegation, one was already planning to vote for the deal, others were leaning yes, and some others have always opposed free trade deals. For some of those who were leaning yes, their conversations with government officials and institutions that tackle environmental problems near the border moved them closer to voting yes. For others who were already skeptical, they returned even more skeptical.
After Guatemala's high court ruled that country could not enter into an agreement that would deny Hondurans refuge in the U.S. unless those migrants applied for asylum in Guatemala, President Donald Trump lashed out July 23 on Twitter. "Guatemala, which has been forming Caravans and sending large numbers of people, some with criminal records, to the United States, has decided to break the deal they had with us on signing a necessary Safe Third [country] Agreement. We were ready to go. Now we are looking at the “BAN,” Tariffs, Remittance Fees, or all of the above. Guatemala has not been good. Big U.S. taxpayer dollars going to them was cut off by me 9 months ago," he wrote.
Over the year since the European Union and the U.S. agreed to pursue trade talks, the two sides "have actually made some decent progress" on regulatory cooperation in pharmaceuticals and medical devices, but "where we are stuck is on industrial tariffs," said Sabine Weyand, director general for trade at the European Commission.
Could Florida's 27-member delegation vote no on the new NAFTA because seasonality provisions for antidumping laws didn't make it into the agreement? There "certainly have been conversations about that," according to Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a pro-trade Democrat from Florida, who added, "And I think Georgia is another one of the states that is deeply interested in seeing a resolution."
Mexico's ambassador to the U.S., Martha Barcena, told an audience that after staff and members of Congress have visited Mexico to evaluate the new NAFTA, "the feedback is that they understood much better the scope of the enormous labor reform that we're doing in Mexico." She said they then realize there isn't a need to ask for a deeper labor reform. So now the questions are turning more to monitoring and enforcement and a guarantee that the law will be implemented.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, wrote to Kevin McAleenan, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, telling him that most cocoa from the Ivory Coast should be stopped at the ports. The letter they sent July 16 said that a report in The Washington Post in June had photos and first-hand accounts that West African cocoa producers rely on indentured child labor.
After the third working group meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, members acknowledged that they're still shaping their specific asks -- but they also complained that Lighthizer has not countered where they have made requests. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said changing the biologics exclusivity period in the new NAFTA should be "so easy."
While Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., says progress is being made in the weekly meetings with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, he said he doubts the working group and USTR will have a meeting of the minds on any of the four planks they're negotiating on in the NAFTA rewrite. The issues outstanding are enforcement, the environment, labor and the biologic drug exclusivity period.
President Donald Trump rejected implementing quotas or tariffs on imported uranium used for nuclear power plants -- a decision sure to please Canada, as it is the most significant source of U.S. imported uranium.