WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama won a big victory for his trade agenda Friday with the Senate’s approval of fast-track legislation that could make it easier for him to complete a wide-ranging trade deal that would include 11 Pacific Rim nations.
A coalition of more than 40 Senate Republicans and 10 Democrats voted for Trade Promotion Authority late Friday, sending the legislation to the House for a difficult fight as Obama faces even more entrenched opposition from Democrats.
The Senate coalition fought off several attempts by opponents to undermine the legislation, defeating amendments that were politically popular but potentially poisonous to Obama’s bid to secure the trade deal.
“This is an important bill, likely the most important bill we will pass this year. It’s important to President Obama,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and primary author of the bill, at the close of debate.
The Trade Promotion Authority’s fast-track provisions would allow Congress, under strict timelines, to consider trade deals with a simple up-or-down vote without any amendments or requirements of a Senate super-majority to end debate.
That would help Obama complete the final details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, with the other 11 nations, a bloc that represents about 40 percent of the global economy.
If the bill clears the House, Obama’s negotiators will push to conclude the Pacific trade pact and send it to Congress for final approval, possibly this year or early next year. The legislative package also includes new funding for labor training for workers that are certified for having lost their jobs because of foreign competition.
Obama’s aggressive push for the trade agenda has upended his relationship with his long-standing allies in the labor movement, as well as anti-corporate liberal activists who strongly supported his 2008 and 2012 elections.
It sparked sharp exchanges, played out in the national media, with liberal icon Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. That led one of Obama’s normally closest allies, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, to question whether he was being sexist for singling out her criticism.
Unions and progressive activists have mobilized their forces against the bill for more than a year now, thinking that defeating the fast-track authority likely would kill negotiations on the Pacific trade deal.
On Friday, union leaders narrowly lost their bid for passage of an amendment designed to create strict regulation of global currency markets, offered by Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., whose states have been ravaged by losses of manufacturing jobs to foreign competition.
Portman, a former trade representative facing a difficult 2016 re-election, locked arms with Democrats in a bid that was designed as a get-tough gesture toward China, which some have long accused of manipulating its currency to make its exports cheaper.
“I want you to be able to tell your workers you not only disagree with currency manipulation, you want to be able to do something about it,” he said during debate.
However, Treasury Department officials warned the Portman proposal would prompt a presidential veto because the other nations potentially would abandon the TPP talks.
In the hours leading up to Portman’s vote, Obama worked the phones with wavering senators to defeat the measure, relying heavily on his usual enemies — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his top lieutenants — to round up 51 votes to narrowly defeat the measure.
“President Obama will veto any TPA bill that contains this amendment. A vote for Portman-Stabenow is also a vote to kill TPP,” Hatch said before the vote on the amendment.
In the end, 41 Republicans and 10 Democrats defeated the amendment.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has said that the TPA bill will come up at some point in June, after his chamber returns from a 10-day break that began Thursday.
