Grassley Says USMCA Could Be Ready for Ratification Week Starting Jan. 21

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he's been told it's going to take three or four days for six other Senate committees to clear the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement so that it can go to the floor for a vote. Whether it can come up the week of Jan. 21 will depend on whether the articles of impeachment have arrived by then, he noted.

Grassley, who was speaking to reporters in his office on Jan. 8, addressed USMCA, Section 232 reform, China trade and trade friction with Europe in the wide-ranging discussion.

In 2020, aside from oversight, Grassley said, his top trade goal for the committee is having a vote on Section 232 reform. “It's still a goal.” He said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the committee, had told him that USMCA needs to be voted on before he will be ready to coordinate on Section 232 reform, “I hope that puts him in a position where he can work with us to get something up," Grassley said. "I think there's enough desire in my committee to do something about 232" to get legislation reported to the floor, he added.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., had suggested during the USMCA debate the day before that there should be legislation to create an Inspector General at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and Grassley said that issue belongs in the Government Affairs Committee rather than his own -- the Section 232 bill is the only trade legislation he sees moving in 2020.

Grassley said he's going to be watching whether China buys at least $40 billion of agricultural products, "because that can be quantified.... I want to make sure they're delivering. Where on intellectual property and trade secrets and [forced] transfer of technology, a lot of those things, we may not know for two, or three, or four years if they're living up to the agreement." With regard to what should happen in phase two, he said, "I get the impression that they have not completely nailed that [phase one] down to the satisfaction that we can be sure we aren't getting our intellectual property stolen from us." But once that's done, he said, the two sides could move on to industrial subsidies.

He said the committee will also engage in oversight on the implementation of USMCA's enforcement provisions.

The USTR has ambitions to do another round of trade talks with Japan, and a free trade deal with Great Britain. With regard to Great Britain, Grassley said that can't be done until that country figures out how tightly it wants to be aligned with the European Union. But, he said, discussions have begun, and he encourages that.

France and the U.S. Treasury Department are trying to work out a solution on the Digital Services Tax over the next two weeks to avoid Section 301 tariffs on French goods, but Grassley dismissed that. "The only rule that should be applicable to that negotiation is get it done right," he said. "It can't be done in the next 15 days."

Grassley said he'll be meeting with the new European Union trade commissioner when he's in Washington next week, and said he's not surprised that tariffs on European goods haven't moved the EU to resolve the Airbus subsidy dispute with the U.S. The World Trade Organization authorized those tariffs, which are meant to bring pressure on Europe to negotiate with the U.S.

"It's been going on for ten years," and Grassley said that because there are similar complaints about subsidies to Boeing pending at the WTO, "it's kind of a complicated thing."