Grassley Says He'll Urge Trump to Withdraw From NAFTA if Dems Want to Reopen Negotiations
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the new Senate Finance Committee chairman, said that while there's room for Democrats to get some of their priorities in the new NAFTA, he thinks President Donald Trump should play hardball if Democrats insist on reopening negotiations. "I want to sit down and talk to those Democrats and see what they have in mind, because surely they can't have in mind renegotiating. But there's things we can do, like side letters on what our feeling is about it," he said. "If they're reaching the point where you gotta go back to the negotiating table, I would encourage the president to pull out of NAFTA, and hope that they're smart enough not to let that happen."
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Grassley said it doesn't make sense to go back to pre-NAFTA days, when Mexico had higher tariffs on U.S. products than the U.S. had on Mexican imports. Similarly, Grassley said Mexican retaliation on agricultural products, such as pork, has to end to get the new NAFTA through Congress. The retaliation is a consequence of U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs. "That's something I'm going to be discussing with the White House and other people, because those have to go. It seems to me those have to go off if we're going to get agriculture behind [the new] U.S.-Mexico-Canada [agreement], and I think agriculture wants to be behind it," he said in response to a question from International Trade Today during a press conference Jan. 9. "If it was used as a tool to get NAFTA negotiated, renegotiated, well, that's been accomplished," he said, so he doesn't understand why the tariffs are still in place.
Grassley said that philosophically he's against quotas as a solution, but said that he didn't oppose the steel quotas on South Korea, and that he hasn't "heard any negative coming out of that."
Getting agricultural interests lobbying for a potential European trade deal is also on Grassley's mind. He reacted to EU Trade Minister Cecilia Malmstrom's comments earlier on Jan. 9 (see 1901090023). "As a matter of negotiating something, just as a practical matter, to get something through the United States Senate that you call a free trade agreement, it takes a lot of agriculture organizations, it takes a lot of agricultural interests to be a locomotive to move along manufacturing and services." So, he said, he doesn't know how Europeans can expect to get a deal passed "if you don't want to negotiate agriculture." Grassley was planning to meet with Malmstrom later in the afternoon.
With regard to Chinese trade talks, Grassley said the president says they're making progress, and he's glad. "There was some rumor over the last week they were going to follow up with a higher-level meeting in Washington, and if all those things happen, it's good news," he said.
The administration's use of Section 301 tariffs to counter Chinese abuses has been lauded in Congress, but many in the Senate feel that the president has overstepped the bounds of Section 232 by suggesting that auto imports are a security threat. Grassley has expressed his interest in moving legislation that could curtail the president's ability to use that statute (see 1812210026). Grassley responded to reports that Trump intends to ask for more power to impose tariffs during the State of the Union address. "We ain't going to give him any greater authority," he said indignantly. "We've already delegated too much."