Washington (CNN)If you really want to see how much clout President Barack Obama has on Capitol Hill these days, watch the Senate on Tuesday.
The same liberal Democratic senators who stuck with the White House through six years of politically excruciating votes are set to break away in droves to oppose Obama’s free trade efforts.
Their goal is to block a bill that greases the wheels for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an enormous 12-country trade deal that Obama wants — badly — to add to his legacy. And their open rebellion against their own party’s president shows that lawmakers are viewing their own political fortunes as increasingly divorced from Obama’s.
The internal rift will be forced into the open Tuesday when the Senate casts its first procedural votes on a bill called “trade promotion authority” — or “fast track.”
It would allow Obama to submit trade deals to Congress for an up-or-down vote with no amendments. That’s key, trade negotiators say, to getting other countries involved in the talks, like Japan, Australia, Canada and Mexico, to take their own political risks of signing off on a final agreement, knowing American lawmakers won’t seek to re-open it later.
Both Republican and Democratic aides remain uncertain about the vote’s outcome — suggesting there’s a real chance the Senate could fall short of the 60 votes necessary to begin debate on the trade bill.
If that happens, it won’t mean the bill is dead. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could shelve it temporarily and bring it back up at a later date. But it would still be a worrisome sign for Obama, who often only seems able to bend Congress to his will when government shutdowns or debt ceiling breaches are at risk.
“At this point it’s very questionable,” whether 60 senators will vote to begin debate, said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois. “Most Democrats including those who are supporting fast track really want to know what they are voting for and so far Sen. McConnell has been very furtive in his strategy.”
In public, Obama is at war with liberal firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who he said this weekend is “absolutely wrong” on the issue.
All the while, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner to replace Obama, has been caught in the middle, offering only tepid statements that allude to liberals’ concerns without taking a stand for or against the deal.
Behind the scenes, though, is a simmering anger on Capitol Hill, where Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, is miffed at Obama’s public criticism of Warren and has urged fellow Democrats to stall the trade bill.
If Obama’s tough talk is alienating Democrats, the lawmakers are concerned about alienating their base. The AFL-CIO has said it is cutting off all campaign funding to Democrats who back Obama’s trade effort.
The liberals’ complaints are myriad: The deal includes a mechanism that allows corporations to ask an independent arbiter to determine whether countries are living up to their trade obligations; its labor and environmental provisions, while perhaps better than the North American Free Trade Agreement, aren’t backed by strong enough enforcement mechanisms; the deal’s text is being negotiated in private, by teams that have signed non-disclosure agreements, and lawmakers are only allowed to see the current negotiating text in a room where they can’t bring staff, can’t take cell phone pictures and can’t print copies.
Warren is giving voice to those frustrations.
“If the President is so confident it’s a good deal, he should declassify the text and let people see it before asking Congress to tie its hands on fixing it,” she told The Washington Post.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest hit back on Monday, insisting that some of Warren’s facts are wrong.
“The point is that if Sen. Warren is wondering what she’s voting on, then she can walk over to the room that has been established on Capitol Hill, by the U.S. trade representative, and she can read the latest version of the negotiated document,” Earnest said.
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