News & information

Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have written a letter to President Barack Obama to register their problems with so-called Fast Track legislation making its way through Congress.

“Fast track, as currently written, would preclude Congress from amending or filibustering any trade agreement submitted to this Congress or any future Congress—potentially through 2021,” they wrote.

Of immediate concern are attempts to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

“While experts, the public, and the press are not allowed to review the latest draft of the TPP,” the senators wrote, “executives of the country's biggest corporations and their lobbyists already have had significant opportunities not only to read it, but to shape its terms.

“Because the negotiations are largely complete, there is no reason the TPP must remain secret from the American people before Congress votes on fast track authority,” they wrote. “The American people should be allowed to weigh in on the facts of the TPP before Members of Congress are asked to voluntarily reduce our ability to amend, shape, or block any trade deal.

“We respectfully suggest that characterizing the assessments of labor unions, journalists, Members of Congress, and others who disagree with your approach to transparency on trade issues as ‘dishonest’ is both untrue and unlikely to serve the best interests of the American people,” the senators wrote.

Click here to read the letter.

If Congress approves Fast Track legislation, it could speed approval of two other trade deals that pose direct threats to letter carriers’ jobs and, if approved, would destroy our system of affordable universal mail and package delivery.

One such deal is the World Trade Organization-sponsored Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) among dozens of countries. The other is the U.S.-European Union’s Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP). In negotiations for both deals, the Europeans are calling for the U.S. to phase out the Postal Service’s monopoly on the delivery of letter mail, a policy adopted by the EU between 1992 and 2011.

In other words, both the T-TIP and the TISA are direct threats to postal workers’ jobs and could destroy our system of affordable universal mail and package delivery.

Read more about why Fast Track is a bad idea.