Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) plans to give President Trump a four-point plan to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement on Monday, as the White House prepares to renegotiate the trade deal with Canada and Mexico.
Brown, a Democratic populist up for reelection next year, often criticizes NAFTA and other trade deals.
Brown says Trump should be careful not to water down “Buy American” provisions during his negotiations with Canada and Mexico.
The Democratic senator wants Trump to press Mexico to enforce labor laws and environmental regulations, which he argues would prevent U.S. jobs from moving to that country.
He supports sector-by-sector negotiations, which he argues would prevent industries from fighting with one another, and he wants to get rid of NAFTA's independent court system used to settle disputes.
Brown also said the negotiations, as they progress, should be made public and allow the American people to participate.
Click here to read Brown’s full letter to Trump.
This is a great political move from Brown because he’s holding Trump accountable on his campaign promise:
Brown has reason to work with Trump beyond their shared skepticism about trade deals: He is up for re-election in the 2018 midterms in a state where Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 9 percentage points. That means he'll need to outperform the Democratic presidential nominee with white working-class voters in order to win a third term.
Before Trump's inauguration, Brown sent him a letter calling on him to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- a massive trade deal involving 12 Pacific Rim nations that had been a second-term priority for former President Barack Obama. Trump responded with a hand-written note thanking Brown for the "great letter" and saying, "I will never let our workers down."
"As I wrote to you right after your election, many candidates have promised big changes in US trade policy only to cave to corporate pressure upon reaching the White House," Brown wrote in Monday's letter to Trump.He added, "By rethinking the US approach to negotiations and obtaining pre-negotiation commitments from our trading partners as outlined above, you can fulfill your campaign promises, set a new standard for a trade policy, and ensure our trade agreements benefit US workers and communities."
For more than four decades, Brown has combined a fierce populism and unapologetic progressive ideals to repeatedly win local and state elections — even as Ohio has trended increasingly conservative. Like Trump, he’s won over social policy–minded voters and people in areas who were hit hard by the collapse of manufacturing in America. He’s won in rural areas and urban, black, and white communities. His approach to politics even got the attention of Hillary Clinton, whose campaign considered tapping him as her vice presidential candidate.
Republicans have taken notice, including many who worked with the Trump campaign and who view Brown as a potential threat to the president in 2020. State Treasurer Josh Mandel, who Brown beat in 2012, has already announced his 2018 Senate campaign, and with Trump wanting to solidify his control over Ohio, Republicans and their allies are expected to spend tens of millions of dollars against Brown and are already laying the groundwork for a brutal campaign fight.
Brown, who cut his political teeth in Ohio hanging around union halls, has some similarities with Trump.
For instance, despite strong support from working class voters, neither man comes from a working class background. Brown has spent almost his entire adult life as a politician, and while he’s nowhere near as wealthy as Trump or even most of his colleagues in the Senate — he consistently ranks at the bottom of the wealthiest members of Congress — he’s comfortable. He lives in a two-story home in a relatively new subdivision of Cleveland, where the walls are covered in framed photos of his children and grandchildren. A painted portrait of his shaggy black rescue dog, Franklin, hangs above the fireplace.
Though they come at it differently, both Trump and Brown have made defense of “the little guy” a core part of their message to voters. For Trump the bad guys are government bureaucrats and foreign workers taking jobs away from Americans, while Brown has spent 40 years hammering away at large corporations and an economic system he views as detrimental to workers.
Even when talking with constituents about controversial issues like Obamacare, Brown is often more straightforward than many of his colleagues. At a meeting with the conservative farm bureau this winter, he and several of the farmers in attendance engaged in a heated exchange over the health care law, with Brown passionately defending it. At another event with the Columbus, Ohio, Chamber of Commerce, Brown made a point of bringing up hot-button topics instead of sticking to the safe ones that he and the business community agree on, like infrastructure spending. “Now let me talk about two things we don’t agree on, Obamacare and the minimum wage,” he said.
Plus with all of Trump’s talk about coal miners, Democrats like Brown are the real ones looking out for coal miners:
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) on Monday said the healthcare extension in the new spending bill is a victory for coal miners.
"This was really, really important," Brown said during an interview on CNN's "New Day."
"And it's a huge victory for the mine workers."
Congressional negotiators have signed off on a deal to fund the government through September, avoiding a shutdown of federal agencies over the president's border wall and other issues, according to two senior congressional aides.
The legislation includes money to permanently extend health benefits for retired miners, a top priority of Senate Democrats facing reelection next year such as Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Brown.
Brown said during the interview Monday the measure had bipartisan support but didn't initially have the support of Republican leadership."Speaker [Paul] Ryan [R-Wis.] stood in the way, we convinced him, and it's part of the deal," he said.
"It means thousands of coal mining families, retirees and widows of coal miners, can rest assured that there won't be these every four months, your healthcare coverage expires."
Brown said this is a group of people that is more likely to have health problems.
I strongly recommend you give the full article a read. Brown will be a top target for the GOP and we need to make sure he’s ready to fight back. Click here to donate and get involved with Brown’s re-election campaign.