Rep. Peter King appeared on Fox's Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo this weekend to discuss the TAA bill that failed to pass in the House last week by a margin of almost three to one. King, of course, used as an opportunity to bash President Obama for a "failure of leadership."
Never mind his party's responsibility in leading as well, or that it's his party that has control of the Congress. If King and his party are so hip on seeing TPP passed, maybe their leadership should have whipped their members to pass the TAA legislation to retrain displaced workers from these crappy trade agreements, instead of blocking any attempt to at least lessen the impact of U.S. jobs that will inevitably be lost if this mess passes.
Why should they do that when it's so much easier to just attack President Obama instead? King apparently also has some newfound love for Bill Clinton, and heaped praise on him working with Newt Gingrich. Somehow he forgot to mention that whole impeachment thing that happened back then as well. Bipartisanship, baby!
BARTIROMO: Explain the division around this trade deal.
KING: Well first of all Maria, let me tell you, this was a total failure of leadership by the President. He has lost all influence with his own party, the Democratic party. Republicans in large numbers supported the President, because this deal, this agreement is so important for us as far as national security. Apart from the economics alone, the national security impact is very significant, because by not having an agreement, we are in effect giving that area of the world, the Pacific, to China. And they're going to be the ones setting the terms and conditions. This would have allowed us to do it.
What happened here was the President has had no leadership role with Congress. He doesn't deal with his own party and so now as his term is winding down, the Democrats are basically giving into their base, which would be the unions and and other progressive groups that are against trade deals, and he's lost all influence with them.
The fact that you said that he made a special trip to Capitol Hill. Well, it shouldn't be a special trip. The President should be always dealing with Congress. I was there in 1994 with President Clinton. That was 24/7 he was working with every member of Congress, Republicans, Democrats, I mean, literally around the clock until he had the votes to get that. He worked closely with Newt Gingrich. He worked with the Republicans, with Democrats. In this case, the President was AWOL. It's a terrible failure of leadership.
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