“Deal Killer” — House Republicans send protest letter to Trump over revamped NAFTA agreement

House Republicans are not happy about gay and transgender language they’ve found in Trump’s new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada and some are even saying it’s a deal breaker:

CBN NEWS – Conservative Republicans in the House are demanding LGBT language be removed from the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

The recently revamped NAFTA agreement includes a pledge to implement “policies that protect workers against employment discrimination on the basis of sex, including with regard to pregnancy, sexual harassment, sexual orientation, gender identity.”

Such language, Politico reports, is unprecedented in a US trade pact.

The LGBT provisions were pushed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose administration holds gay rights as a major part of its agenda.

However, a group of 40 US congressmen penned a letter of protest to the Trump administration saying the trade agreement is no place for the adoption of social policy.

“It is especially inappropriate and insulting to our sovereignty to needlessly submit to social policies which the United States Congress has so far explicitly refused to accept,” they wrote in the Nov. 16 missive.

One of the signatories, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), even went so far as to say that, for him, the provisions could be a “deal killer.”

“This is language that is going to cause a lot of people to reconsider their support of the trade agreement, and to the point that it may endanger the passage of the trade agreement unless something is done,” Lamborn told Politico.

“At this point I’m a ‘no’ vote and I would encourage others to be a ‘no’ vote unless something is done,” he said. “And things could be done within the agreement.”

It’s unclear, however, whether Canada’s prime minister would be willing to drop his LGBT demands.

I doubt Trump will change his position on this, especially if it means losing Trudeau. And Trudeau will almost certainly demand it stays in there.

But with the House changing hands in January, they’d have to vote on it in the lame duck session to get it passed. I’m not sure how many lawmakers consider this a deal breaker, but it’d have to be quite a few more than Lamborn to put pressure on the administration.


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