Speaker Pelosi: Pass USMCA Before Session Slips Away!

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, we passed a milestone: It’s now been over one year since President Trump signed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade—over a year! The holdup: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Everyone recognizes that the USMCA would be a big improvement over its predecessor, NAFTA. Perhaps most notably, the USMCA would update our trade relationships to include strong intellectual property protections—and preserve them in future trade deals—and take into account information-sharing technologies that were not even invented when NAFTA was negotiated. Our nation’s innovators are responsible for much of the economic growth and strength we have demonstrated in recent years, and they deserved to have modern protections like those written into the USMCA.

Yet instead of passing the USMCA for the benefit of the American people, Nancy Pelosi is dragging her feet and trying to tinker with the agreement in order to make it appear that she has had a significant impact on its substance when she, in fact, has not. It’s all a ploy to try to say that President Trump wasn’t responsible for forging an improved trade environment for the American people. But he was.

Here we are, with only a few weeks left on Congress’s schedule before the members break for the holidays, and there is a distinct possibility that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will fail altogether this year in ratifying USMCA and modernizing our country’s trade relations with our closest neighbors. Indeed, Speaker Pelosi herself said in a recent press conference that she might not bring up the USMCA for a vote until next year.

Meanwhile, we all know that the House of Representatives has been totally consumed with other matters that have little to no benefit for the public. Thus, the work of the People, including action the USMCA, has been ignored. The American People deserve better.

We urge Speaker Pelosi to hold a vote on the USMCA immediately, before this session of Congress slips away.