Trade-deal vote ruled out for ’18

Senate’s McConnell calls NAFTA replacement a ’19 priority

President Donald Trump’s renegotiated trade deal with Mexico and Canada won’t get a vote in Congress this year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, setting up a potential contentious fight with Democrats next year over a signature White House accomplishment.

“My trade advisers say you can’t possibly do it under the various steps that we have to go through. I had not heard that it might be possible to address it this year,” McConnell said in an interview Tuesday with Bloomberg News in Washington.

Waiting until next year for Congress to approve the measure opens the possibility for Democrats to seek concessions from the White House if the party wins a majority in the House in midterm elections Nov. 6.

McConnell said he has not had conversations with the White House about passing the agreement this year. “There’s no question this will be on the top of the agenda” next year, he said.

The White House last month reached a deal with its two closest trading partners to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump rebranded it as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and praised it as a historic achievement. After 13 months of negotiations and several threats by Trump to withdraw from NAFTA, the U.S. business community and many lawmakers expressed cautious optimism, a sentiment McConnell echoed.

“There was a lot of relief that at least in this hemisphere with the Mexicans and the Canadians we seem to have reached a settlement,” he said.

Asked about the administration’s trade policy more broadly, including U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports, McConnell said he’s taking a waitand-see approach. He said Trump “deserves to have a little slack cut here and that’s what we’re doing” to improve America’s trade relationships in the longer term, he said.

“I’m not a big fan of tariffs but I’m certainly happy we seem to have settled the situation with Canada and Mexico,” McConnell said in the interview. “And if the short-term trade war ends up producing a better relationship with China, that would be great.”

A bipartisan group of 169 members of Congress is urging the Trump administration to establish a process for U.S. companies to seek relief from the president’s latest tariffs on Chinese imports.

U.S. Reps. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., and Ron Kind, D-Wis., sent a letter Monday signed by 167 other members to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer asking for an exclusion process for duties on $200 billion in goods imposed last month.

There have been three rounds of tariffs, starting with 25 percent duties on lists of $34 billion and $16 billion in products, plus a 10 percent levy on $200 billion. While the administration is allowing companies to seek relief from duties on the first two lists, it hasn’t put a process in place for the third tranche on grounds there’s time for companies to adjust before the rate increases to 25 percent on Jan. 1.

“The lack of such a process for this most recent list is a glaring omission, particularly given its size in relation to the first two lists,” the letter from the lawmakers said. “An exclusion process is vital to ensuring that U.S. companies can seek relief.”