Obama signs TPA, trade preference legislation

White House now believes it has the leverage it needs to seal the massive 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.    President Obama on Monday signed Trade Promotion Authority into law, giving him and the next president more negotiating power in negotiations over free trade agreements. The administration will use the new power from Congress to conclude a Trans-Pacific Partnership deal with 11 other nations that is geared at lowering tariffs and trade barriers.
   The TPA gives Congress the ability to set negotiating guidelines for the United States up front, but at ratification it can only vote for or against the entire deal without making any changes.
   President Obama relied on an unlikely set of allies – Republican leaders Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in the Senate and John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Paul Ryan, R-Wis., in the House – to get the legislation through Congress.
   The process was not pretty, but in the end Obama got a key piece of legislation that will allow him to proceed with TPP, a top economic priority that he wants to see through before leaving office. Initially, congressional leaders linked TPA with an extension of Trade Adjustment Assistance, thinking that Democrats would again support a program that provides assistance to workers displaced by foreign trade. When House Democrats opted to vote against a program they support to scuttle the TPA, the leadership decoupled the bills knowing they had enough Republican votes at that point to pass TPA on its own.
   Trade Adjustment Assistance, a program that provides aid to workers displaced by free trade deals, passed shortly afterwards as a separate piece of legislation.
   Obama also signed the Trade Preferences Extension Act of 2015, which renews the African Growth and Opportunity Act for 10 years, extends the Hait/HOPE trade program through 2025 and retroactively renews the Generalized System of Preferences program, while updating it to remove an exclusion on travel goods such as luggage and phone cases. The law also clarifies tariff classifications for protective active footwear and performance underwear.