Thread by @matthewstoller

1. You learn a lot about politicians when the spotlight is not on them. So I want to offer an observation about something Kamala just did - a quiet and almost wholly unnoticed favor to big business and Mitch McConnell - suggesting she would have been a problematic President.🧵

2. In late November, after the election, the Biden White House nominated two people for something called the International Trade Commission. The ITC is the body designed to address cheating by foreign companies who dump products to destroy US producers.

whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…

3. The ITC is one of those places where free traders have run the roost for decades, crushing industry after industry by refusing to uphold anti-dumping law. It's also a place that few in D.C. care about. Domestic producers? Pffeh, who cares about steel and mattress imports?

4. The ITC recently had something of a revival over the past ten years, with some populist impulses since 2016, largely in response to the broader frustration at offshoring that Trump and then Biden reflected.

5. Well last month, Kamala cut a deal with Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer to get a Democrat named James Coughlan and a free trade Republican named Haley Craig nominated and confirmed to the ITC. And the reasons are weird and problematic. prospect.org/blogs-and-news…

6. The Republican, Haley Craig, is very talented, but a straight-up corporate free trader. She's a former Facebook employee and Chamber acolyte, an ex-Ted Cruz and ex-Pat Toomey staffer. She's exactly who you'd want on the ITC to subvert tariffs and domestic production.

7. McConnell got a big policy gain to stop what Biden and Trump are trying to do, which is bring production back to the U.S. The steel industry, for instance, gets harmed by bad decisions at the ITC. That's why the Steelworkers oppose these nominees.

8. But what about the other guy? James Coughlan is an official with the Export-Import Bank, and his views on dumping and IP isn't clear. So why is he nominated? He's the husband of Kamala's campaign chief of staff. That's it. That's the reason.

8. Now, it's weird to nominate someone in late November and expect them to be confirmed. But Ron Wyden, Mitch McConnell, and Chuck Schumer tried to accelerated the process to do this favor for the Chamber and Kamala.

9. Importers were overjoyed, with trade associations representing Amazon, Walmart, Google, Nike, et al supporting the nominations.

10. The hearing for Craig and Couglin in the Finance Committee was this morning. Ted Cruz, Dick Durbin and Ron Wyden were effusive about the nominees. finance.senate.gov/hearings/heari…

11. There isn't enough time to get these nominees a full vote vote, but the Senate can confirm with a unanimous agreement. Schumer, McConnell, Wyden, Cruz and both caucuses want to let this slip through since no one is noticing. Aka come on, man, let it go, these are *friends.*

12. I get McConnell's view. He's a die-hard free trader, he hated Biden's tariffs and he wants to kneecap Trump. But Kamala's approach is harder to justify. She's willing to let whole domestic industries get harmed to be nice to a staffer's spouse. And Schumer is going along.

13. Similarly difficult to understand are Republican Senators, nearly all of whom refused to object even though the R is a Chamber of Commerce friendly nominees who would hurt Trump's agenda. Remember, any one of them could have blocked these nominees.

Fortunately...

14. Several Senators expressed skepticism at the hearing today, including populist Democrat Sherrod Brown, who lost and will no longer be in the Senate come January.

15. Even better, one Senator actually stepped up to directly commit to block these corporate-friendly free traders making core elements of trade policy for years. That's Josh Hawley, a highly polarizing right-wing populist.

https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/1869077447632912889

16. So it's unlikely these nominees get confirmed. And Trump will be able to choose different nominees. While I don't support Trump, his views on the need to restructure trade and strengthen domestic industries are reasonable, even if his approach is problematic.

17. Broadly, this out of the spotlight episode shows how little interest Kamala had in the work of governing. On the way as VP, one of her final acts is to try and give a job to a staffer's spouse, unconcerned about its impacts on tens of thousands of Americans. Just tawdry.

18. Kamala represents a certain approach to Democratic Party politics. Her view is politics is a club of insiders who are friends with each other, with no broader vision. Hopefully that era is ending. It isn't over, but it's clear that American people want more than norms.