Rep. David Young, an Iowa Republican, was recently at a Des Moines event commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was buttonholed by an activist urging him to vote against giving President Obama trade-promotion authority—aka fast track—to allow him to expedite a giant new Asia-Pacific trade deal, the issue where Obama and congressional GOP leaders seem most likely to come to agreement this year. The activist, Matthew Covington, urged Young to beware of the executive overreach that Obama would be engaging in if he secured fast-track powers. “I said, ‘This is such a large trade deal and the Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate that, not the president. This would give the authority to the president. But we elected you to give you that authority, to see what’s in this trade deal, to make sure it doesn’t jeopardize Iowa values,’ ” recounted Covington.

That sounds like a garden-variety pitch from a grass-roots constitutional conservative. Except Covington is no Tea Partier. He is an organizer with a 40-year-old progressive organization called Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement that has made its name in recent years fighting factory farming, payday lending, and wage-theft; is closely tied to labor unions; and last year hosted Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, for a barnstorming tour of Iowa. The organization, like many others on the left, is opposed to granting Obama fast-track authority, which requires Congress to vote on trade deals with an up or down vote, and to the huge new 12-nation trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Covington worries that the TPP will undermine U.S. wages and manufacturing, as many Americans believe NAFTA did, while also giving multinational corporations new powers to run roughshod over U.S. food safety and environmental regulations.

To try to block fast track and the TPP, liberal groups and labor unions are not organizing only among their own but are also reaching across the spectrum to conservatives skeptical of fast track and TPP. This left-right alliance has been duly noted in recent months. What has gone underappreciated, though, is just how much the opponents of the trade deals on the left are appealing to the right very much on the right’s own terms. After years of ridiculing the Tea Party movement’s talk of Obama as an autocrat on issues such as immigration and health care, the left is now pushing those very buttons on trade, noting that fast track would give Obama vast powers and that the TPP would create a new international arbitration panel where corporations could challenge local, state, and national laws. Some left-leaning advocates are going so far as to link the trade issue to the conservative litany of Obama outrages: the IRS scrutiny of Tea Party groups, Benghazi, and the “Fast and Furious” gun-running fiasco, among others.