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CHAPTER 4 Congress, Constituencies, and U.S. Trade Policy I. M. (Mac) Destler Much of the literature on Congress and trade has established, beyond reasonable doubt, the responsiveness of individual members to constituent interests concentrated within their districts, and to the national extensions of such interests. Connections to organized labor, for example, were reliable predictors of votes on domestic content legislation for automobiles in 1983, or NAFfA in 1993. The routine trade business in Congressional offices, moreover, is typified by dealings with economic interests seeking to get help, or avoid hurt. This essay will neither add to nor subtract from that literature. Nor will it challenge the argument advanced by Rodrik (1995): that trade protection can be a rational policy course for political actors, even though it is suboptimal in comparison to other policy tools theoretically available. Indeed, this analysis assumes its rationality in terms of constituent politics. The political logic of progressive special-interest domination has been set forth by many scholars, perhaps most grandly by Mancur Olson in The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982). Its applicability to trade was demonstrated empirically by how Congress handled the tariff in its first 142 years, and its politics chronicled and analyzed by E.E. Schattschneider (1935) in his classic work, Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff. Certainly micropolitics of this sort continues to drive Congressional behavior on many issues-water projects and pricing, and grazing and mineral rights on public lands are just a couple of examples that spring to mind. And it continues to make its regular mark on trade policy: witness steel in the seventies, autos in the eighties, antidumping policy since 1979, and textiles from time immemorial. But it does not dominate. It explains many of our specific departures from the liberal trade ideal, but it does not explain the broader movement toward that ideal.I The micropolitics of trade protection does not explain the macropolitics of trade liberalization. And Congress has played a key role in both. 94 Constituent Interests and U.S. Trade Policies Like much of my previous work, this essay will focus on the macropolitics of trade policy, and hence on the overall role that Congress has played, and how this has affected representation of constituent interests. Regarding experience to date, the central question is how and why Congress has sustained, politically, its post-Smoot-Hawley bargain with successive Presidents: its delegation of product-specific trade policy authority to the executive branch and to quasi-judicial institutions like the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC). Regarding the future, the question is whether Congress will continue to delegate authority in this manner. To shed some light on these matters, and hopefully provoke reaction, the discussion here will be organized around four propositions: 1) For over 60 years, Congress has been an active co-conspirator in measures that weaken the hold ofmicropolitics on trade, and (as a predictable consequence) also reduce Congressional power over trade. 2) This behavior contradicts widely shared academic assumptions about Congressional behavior, but is consistent with an alternative set of assumptions. 3) This behavior has been reinforced by four trade-political conditions: executive branch priority to trade expansion; bipartisanship; effective executive branch dealings with the Congressional trade committees, and the intellectual dominance offree-trade arguments. 4) Erosion of any of these four weakens, marginally, the rather robust power-sharing system, and makes trade-liberalizing legislation substantially more difficult to obtain. What follows aims to put flesh on those bones. I. Post Smoot-Hawley: Congress as Liberalization Co-Conspirator In the Smoot-Hawley Act, Congress passed comprehensive tariff legislation for the last time. Four years later, it began to delegate this authority to the President by enacting the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which allowed his officials to negotiate reciprocal duty-reduction agreements with foreign nations. Reasonably regular renewals of this Act continued through the Eisenhower administration, and were followed by the grant of yet-broader negotiating authority in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. After average tariffs had been reduced below 10 percent, Congress enacted "fast-track" legislation, which gave the executive branch the capacity to negotiate reductions in nontariff barriers to trade that involved changes in other domestic law. Bills granting or extending this authority were enacted in 1974, 1979, 1984, 1988, 1991, and 1993.2 The House of Representatives resisted renewal of this authority in 1997, but President Bill Clinton is committed to pressing his request again in early 1998. [3.145.178.240] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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