Congress has blocked votes on the free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama since 2007. Susan Schwab, who negotiated the pacts as U.S. Trade Representative under President George W. Bush, says a concerted push by the Obama White House may soon break the logjam. “I think they will find a receptive audience in the House. Not just the Republican leadership in the House, but there are also a lot of Democrats in the House who would have voted yes for these trade agreements, you know, three years ago and four years ago but were never allowed to have that vote, because the Democratic leadership stopped it.”
The Obama administration has made doubling U.S. exports by 2014 a top economic priority. Winning ratification of the FTAs will likely prove essential to meeting that goal.
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