This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 8th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

So-called Fast Track Authority is meant to give the President a better bargaining position for trade agreements,

but it's not clear that this authority actually brings the US closer to truly free trade.

Bill Watson is a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

He comments.

Well, the president has the authority to negotiate treaties

all he wants.

He can negotiate the treaty and then submit it to the Senate for two-thirds vote.

Or he can submit it to both houses of Congress for a majority vote from both houses of Congress. It's like passing a statute.

What Fast Track does is it guarantees that Congress won't delay their vote or make extra demands after the President has

put in all this work negotiating agreement. So it makes it a little bit easier for the president to get confidence from other countries that the agreement

will be ratified, that the terms will be agreed to the so it's a it's a way to change the process

to put Congress's input at an earlier phase that's less disruptive for getting trade agreements

through.

Do we have any sense of what trade agreements would look like if Congress were involved later in the process

as they would be without fast track

as opposed to earlier in the process

when the president actually has to make

some calculations about what to include

and what not to include. Well we've actually never really passed an agreement

without Fast Track there's one there's one counter example, but it was mostly a foreign policy issue with the US Jordan

FTA.

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