Secret trade agreement covering 68 percent of world services published by WikiLeaks

[pampango]

29. Certainly true that agreements (trade, peace or labor) can be "good or crappy" but

the republican accusation was that they were both crappy - "flooding our markets with foreign commodities" - and negotiated secretly - "It secretly has made tariff agreements with our foreign competitors".

Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) into law in 1934. RTAA gave the president power to negotiate bilateral, reciprocal trade agreements with other countries. This law enabled Roosevelt to liberalize American trade policy around the globe. It is widely credited with ushering in the era of liberal trade policy that persists to this day.

By giving the President the authority to negotiate these deals, the Congress effectively ceded a part of their power (authorized under US Constitution, Article I, Section VIII) to the executive branch.

After the Civil War, Democrats were generally the party of trade liberalization, while Republicans were generally for higher tariffs. This pattern was clear in congressional votes for tariffs from 1860 until 1930. Democrats were the congressional minority in the majority of Congresses between the Civil War and the election of Roosevelt. During their brief stints in the majority, Democrats passed several tariff reduction bills. Examples include the Wilson-Gorman Act of 1894 and the Underwood Tariff Act of 1913. However, subsequent Republican majorities always undid these unilateral tariff reductions.

... the administration decided to take advantage of having a Democratic-controlled Congress and Presidency to push through the RTAA. In 1936 and 1940, the Republican Party ran on a platform of repealing the tariff reductions secured under the RTAA.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Tariff_Act

FDR's RTAA is what gave us "secret trade deals" and 'fast track' for their approval or rejection by Congress.

The complaints against FDR in 1936 were quite similar to the complaints against Obama today even though times and the nature of the agreements has changed.