American lawyers gather to ponder Trump’s NAFTA options: Can he cancel it alone?
WASHINGTON Legal experts huddled together at a recent conference to ponder a question that could go from being a distant hypothetical to one that dominates Canada-U.S.-Mexico relations: can an American president unilaterally cancel a trade deal?
The reason it's suddenly relevant, of course, is President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to scrap NAFTA, and it came up at a Duke University conference on exiting international agreements, where one session was dedicated specifically to trade.
Curtis Bradley told colleagues he’s convinced the president could do it alone. Bradley’s view carries weight: he co-edits the prestigious international-law journal of the American Law Institute. And he has little sympathy for the argument the president can’t act.
That argument stems from an apparent contradiction in the cornerstone of American law: in the U.S. Constitution, Article One gives Congress power over commerce, while Article Two gives the president power over international affairs.
People are now being prompted to discuss this by a rare political phenomenon: Presidents don’t usually threaten to cancel trade deals.
“I know those arguments (that he can’t do it). I happen to think (they’re) not right,” Bradley said in an interview, after the Oct. 27-28 conference.
“The bottom line is that for at least the last 100 years presidents have acted on behalf of the United States to decide whether to withdraw the United States from treaties... We don’t do it often, I should emphasize. It’s a rare event... (But) Congress has (almost) never objected.”
Trade deals are fundamentally the same, in his view, as other international treaties, like the Paris climate accord.
“There’s just nothing special about commerce,” Bradley said. “(Congress) could never make NAFTA... It could never make the Korea-U.S. agreement... I hate to be so critical, because I tried to listen hard (to the opposing argument)... But many people in the room ... were puzzled by (it).”