Republican Senator Doubts USMCA Can Have 2019 Ratification

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said the Trump administration will have great difficulty getting the House of Representatives to approve its rewrite of NAFTA. "I'm not aware of a single elected Democratic member of Congress who has endorsed this. I'm aware of many who have panned it. So it's not clear to me what the path forward is. There's a lot of resistance from Democrats. There's a lot of protectionist provisions that were meant to satisfy the protectionist urges of some of my Democratic colleagues, [but] they don't seem to have been sufficient yet," he said Jan. 31 at a reporters roundtable in his office. Toomey suggested that the text is not so protectionist that he's a certain no vote. "With certain changes to the implementing legislation, I could agree to this revised NAFTA. That would require moving in the direction of free traders."