New Dems Name Trade Chair, Call for UK FTA
Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, one of the Democratic party's majority makers in 2018 and a centrist from the Houston area, will lead the trade task force in the New Democrat Coalition caucus this Congress. She said the New Dems want to advocate for tariff relief, and for tariff elimination with the U.K. and the EU. "The New Dems have long been at the center of driving pro-growth, pro-innovation policy that recognizes the importance of trade in our economy and the opportunities that it presents," she said at a recent press conference announcing the leaders of the task forces. Reps. Don Beyer, D-Va., and Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., are the co-chairs of the task force, and both serve on the House Ways and Means Committee.
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The Biden administration has been wary of lowering tariffs even for developed countries like the U.K., and the New Dems' workforce development task force chairwoman's comments show how sensitive trade can be.
Rep. Kathy Manning, D-N.C., said: "Historically, my district was home to textile and furniture manufacturing, and following NAFTA, many of those businesses moved overseas or went out of business. We lost hundreds of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and our community has had to rethink how we are going to grow in the future." She said now the region is a leader in aerospace, and Toyota is planning to open an electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant. Even though, she said, her district's economy is booming, the dislocation from trade decades ago is not forgotten.