I was watching The Ed Show yesterday and Ed Shultz was talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that President Obama has been pressing Congress to support.  Mr. Shultz said that 85% of the Democrats in Congress are against the TPP and so are all of the labor unions.

The odd thing is that Congressional Republicans, Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce are praising and strongly supporting the President while Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are not.  Even some Republicans on the far right and extreme right are supporting him.  These are the same folks who worked so hard to prevent him from getting elected in the first place.

I’m talking about Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan, Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Ted Cruise.  That’s scary!  The Republicans in Congress have been trying to bring down President Obama and ruin his legacy since he was first elected President.  They have even voted against legislation that they have always supported or that they themselves introduced once they found that he was in support of it.

Why this sudden drastic change?  Under these circumstances it would not be unreasonable for anyone to assume that there is a skunk in the woodpile.  In other words, something stinks; something is wrong.  It just doesn’t feel right!  At this point very few details on the agreement have been made available to Congress and the public and the White House is being quite coy when they are pressed for details.

In order to gain the support of Washington Democrats and the Party base, President Obama is touting his resume of initiatives put forward in support of middleclass Americans and the accomplishments that he has accumulated thus far in an effort to help reestablish them.  He says that he has always worked on behalf of the middle class and that he would not support the TPP if he did not believe that it is the right thing to do: he is saying ‘trust me.’

Obviously there are a lot of those who are staunch supporters of President Obama but in this case they are balking at giving him their support on this one.  It is just too important of an issue for them to go down the ‘trust me’ path.

It would be hard enough to do it if organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street and virtually every Republican that loathes him wasn’t suddenly praising him and giving him their full support.  With them supporting the TPP, it will be next to impossible to gain the level of support from Democrats that he is seeking without providing full details on the agreement.  Even then there would probably still be a substantial amount of resistance.

There are those who believe that the TPP would give too much power to corporations and give foreign governments an extraordinary amount of control over America’s business affairs.  They also believe that it would put downward pressure on American wages while still bringing about the loss of jobs.

Most Americans do not know much about the technical aspects of the TPP or any of the other trade agreements that America has entered into.  But we do have those that we have elected to represent us and it is at times like these that they should do the job that we elected them to do.  It is up to them to get informed and make sure that America’s best interest and our overall best interest are served.  To do this they will need to be able to have details of the agreement so that they can review them and understand them before they throw their support behind the President.

Although I am an avid supporter of President Obama, I believe that there should be reasonable discourse and debate on the TPP especially if Senators like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders believe that it is giving large corporations even more power while stifling the voice of middleclass Americans and further stripping them of what little power that they have left.  Since he was elected, President Obama has done a lot in an effort to bring back the middle class.  And as he mentioned, he has always worked on their behalf.  He might be right about the TPP; but so might Senators Warren and Sanders.  That’s why there needs to be discourse and debate.

Eulus Dennis