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Pat Toomey is the lone Republican opposing the USMCA trade deal. Susan Wild is a Democrat who got to yes. Here’s why.

December 16, 2019

After several meetings this spring with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Lehigh Valley Congresswoman Susan Wild still had concerns about provisions in the new trade pact that was being negotiated with Canada and Mexico, and penned a letter to Lighthizer in June repeating her concerns.

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey also wasn't happy with how the agreement, a revision of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, was coming together. At a July hearing, he sat in front of a red poster that read "NAFTA > USMCA," the acronym for the revised agreement.

After urging the administration to make changes, the two lawmakers ended up with sharply different views of the final product that the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to approve this week.

Toomey, a Republican and a staunch free-trader, is the only Republican to say he won't support the trade deal, saying the final change went in the wrong direction.

Wild, a freshman Democrat, is on board with the pact after the revisions, which also won support from labor leaders, a key Democratic constituency.

Here's how the two Lehigh Valley legislators explain their stances on the trade deal:

Pharmaceutical provision a key piece

The final trade deal nixed an intellectual property provision for biologic medicines that had concerned Wild and other Democrats.

U.S. law gives 12 years of protections to those new drugs, allowing companies time to recoup research costs. The earlier USMCA draft had negotiated that protection period to 10 years. But Wild and other Democrats saw that provision as reducing competition and retreating from their campaign promise of working to lower drug prices.

When she and other Democrats initially met with Lighthizer in the spring, "we had been told no room for any modifications," said Wild, who reiterated her concern about the pharmaceutical provisions in a June letter that she and other freshmen Democrats sent.

The final version removed that intellectual property protection, a change that Toomey decried as "complete capitulation" to Democrats that would leave any patent protections up to Canadian and Mexican law.

Divide on labor language

The pharmaceutical provision wasn't the only section that frustrated Toomey.

He also expressed concerns at labor provisions, including additions that Toomey said could lead to penalties on Mexican goods from factories that are not compliance with collective bargaining requirements.

Toomey said the deal would "impose essentially a minimum wage" on Mexico, arguing that would diminish the country's competitive advantage of being "a low-cost economy" and raise costs for U.S. consumers.

The letter from Wild and other freshmen also had lobbied the administration on labor provisions, arguing that standards that boost wages for Mexican workers would make it less enticing for companies to outsource jobs to Mexico.

Overall economic effect

Toomey doesn't dismiss all of the changes. Noting the technological changes that have occurred since NAFTA was drafted, he said it made sense to modernize aspects of trade relations among the three countries to reflect the digital economy.

But overall, he doesn't see the deal as a significant economic improvement over the provisions in NAFTA, describing much of it as the same and the pieces that aren't as "counterproductive."

"On balance, it's very likely that we will have, modestly, less growth, less trade and less job creation than the underlying NAFTA," Toomey told reporters.

Wild said she still needs to see the final text to assess the overall effect it will have in her congressional district and in Pennsylvania. But throughout the negotiations, Wild said she heard an urgency from both manufacturers and labor groups to get an agreement that would bring some certainty to economic relations between the neighboring countries.

"I have always felt from the beginning that I needed to work to get to a ‘yes' vote on USMCA," she said. "I know it was welcome news."