Sherrod Brown throws support behind trade deal

Despite originally opposing the revamped North American trade agreement, Sen. Sherrod Brown has thrown his support behind the USMCA now that it has better protections for workers.

“I have never — as you point out, never — voted for a trade agreement because every trade agreement presented to Congress is all about corporate interest and investor protections and corporate special interest protections and never about workers,” Brown (D-Ohio) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning. “When President [Donald] Trump put out his NAFTA revision, it was the same template. It was a pro-corporate deal that helped Washington special interests.”

The USMCA agreement with Mexico and Canada is meant to supplant NAFTA, which was negotiated and implemented in the 1990s.

“I worked with Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and with the labor movement and with Senator [Ron] Wyden of Oregon, my partner in this, on the Brown-Wyden language which simply says these agreements should be about workers and this will mean that workers in the United States and with our trading partners will see their standard of living increase.”

Brown also said that while the new deal will start to slow down the tide of corporations moving their production out of the United States, it isn’t fixing the bigger problem posed by Trump’s tax bill.

“If you shut down production in Lawrencetown, Ohio, you’re paying a 21 percent tax rate there. You move to Mexico, and you pay 10.5 percent,” Brown explained. “So the president has continued his pro-corporate trade policy through the tax system and other ways. But this agreement, because we’ve got these labor standards that will lift workers up, makes sense.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine