Ohio Senator Portman, in Final Policy Effort in Senate, Calls for More Global Trade

U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) retires at the end of the year, but before he does, he hopes to have a hand in reenergizing openness toward global trade, a policy perspective that hasn’t been ascendant in the Biden administration or the preceding Trump administration. 

In a guest column for the D.C.-based Hill newspaper, Portman and his Democratic Delaware colleague Chris Coons called on Congress to pass a legislative package facilitating foreign trade agreements. The lawmakers particularly urged enactment of their Trading System Preservation Act. The act would enable the president to iron out industry-specific trade deals with other nations that are part of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and would allow negotiation of comprehensive agreements with Ecuador, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and Kenya. 

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Ohio Democrats Negative on New NAFTA Deal Known as USMCA

  President Donald Trump’s Administration is expected to speed up the procedural steps necessary for a Congressional vote on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), media outlets report. Trump should issue a “statement of administrative action” soon, Reuters reported. U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that was “not a…

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Commentary: Contrary to Some Conservatives’ Slavish Devotion Free Trade Dogma, Trade Deficits Do Matter

by Spencer P. Morrison   Steve Hanke recently set out to prove “why President Trump’s trade message and protectionist policies are rubbish” in a Forbes article. Instead, the Johns Hopkins University economist exposed himself as a word-mincing, logic-twisting sophist – just like every other intellectual mercenary associated with the faux-libertarian propaganda mill that is the…

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As President Trump’s Successes with Trade Grow, Globalist Republicans’ Grip on ‘Free Trade’ Orthodoxy Slips

by Michael Noyes   Eight hours before the first polls closed on November 8, 2016, the late Charles Krauthammer appeared on Fox News and made a prediction. Should Trump win, he said, it would “irreversibly” change the Republican Party. “Particularly the most obvious issues will be immigration and trade,” Krauthammer…

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