USMCA Timing Starting to Worry Grassley
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, one of the few Republicans in Washington who has not criticized House Democrats for spending months negotiating for changes to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, told reporters Oct. 22 he recently started to worry about time running out.
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"There could be a major breakthrough here," he said of the working group negotiations. "These negotiations are very much in private."
But Grassley said he'll be urging House Democrats to move quickly, and he's also cautioning U.S. Trade Robert Lighthizer not to bend too much. "Lighthizer needs to know by satisfying too much what Democrats want, he needs to make sure he doesn’t lose Republican votes," Grassley said on a conference call with reporters.
On the question of timing, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said it's too early to talk about whether the House might stay in session more days in 2019 if the working group concludes its negotiations and clears the new NAFTA in the next few weeks. The House of Representatives is scheduled to be away from Washington the first and last weeks of November, and to leave for the year after Dec. 12. "There's certainly a crunch on the appropriations bills, there's a lot of other pieces of legislation we need to get done, and we'll try to accommodate that," he said.
Hoyer, who was responding to a question from International Trade Today, said he wanted to reiterate: "We do really want to see the USMCA adopted ... because we believe this is an improvement on the existing document."