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Addressing employees Tuesday at Blair Companies, the Altoona-based conglomerate with operations across Asia, Rep. Bill Shuster, R-9th District, offered an economic vision in line with the Republican Party’s free-trade ideology.
“(We’re) going to make it easier for America to do business with those countries,” Shuster said. “We’re lowering some of the trade barriers – lowering their trade barriers, not our trade barriers. If we think we can just be Fortress America and make things and grow our crops here, we’re not going to succeed.”
After the meeting, however, Shuster offered the other side of the coin: America is making bad deals with foreign countries, he said, and one-sided trade agreements could hurt local jobs.
Those two views of trade, sometimes complementary and sometimes at odds with each other, make up a divide that’s increasingly clear in the Republican presidential race.
With Shuster’s primary against challenger Art Halvorson less than three weeks away, it’s become a local campaign issue as well.
“America first”
Accompanying Shuster at the Blair Companies was U.S. Chamber of Commerce regional official Ben Taylor, who offered the congressman an award for his favorable votes.
Noting that “some folks on the far right” have attacked Shuster and his colleagues for their trade stances, Taylor said, “He’s voting over nine out of 10 times with the business community on the issues we feel are important.”
While Republicans in recent decades have typically voted to expand foreign trade by removing legal barriers, the rise of GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has put protectionism back into the spotlight. Trump has attacked the Trans-Pacific Partnership – a massive, multinational trade agreement awaiting U.S. approval – as a “horrible deal,” and Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have spoken out against the plan.
Neither Shuster nor Halvorson have endorsed Trump’s views, which some economists have compared to the centuries-old practice of mercantilism that limited powerful nations’ foreign trade. Still, Halvorson has cited Shuster’s trade votes as evidence that he doesn’t have America’s interests at heart.
“You see him flip-flop,” Halvorson said. “He’s gone from Romney-like to Trump-like because he’s blowing in the wind.”
Halvorson rejected deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he said subsumes America’s sovereignty to foreign third parties. Stressing that he supports free trade in general, Halvorson said he would rather see individual deals with allies than sweeping regional agreements.
“I’m for balanced free trade. America-first, balanced free trade,” he said.
Decades of deals
Free trade agreements have been frequent targets for criticism in areas like western and central Pennsylvania, where manufacturing jobs have trickled for decades to other countries. When Congress passed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, Shuster’s father, then-congressman Bud Shuster, voted against most of his Republican colleagues to oppose the deal.
“I’m trying to find reasons to be for it, but the closer I study it, the deeper my concern,” the elder Shuster told reporters that year. “I think it’s fundamentally unfair.”
Since the younger Shuster took over his father’s seat in 2001, he has voted for a series of overseas deals, including the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement.
When the Trans-Pacific Partnership first reached Congress last year, he voted to give President Barack Obama “fast-track” authority to negotiate the details. In a news release at the time, Shuster hailed the vote as a conservative victory that would hold Obama to Congress-imposed rules and standards.
Nevertheless, his votes have drawn criticism from Halvorson, who said in a written statement that deals like the partnership “forfeit our sovereignty.” Halvorson compared Shuster unfavorably with his father, citing the NAFTA vote as an example.
“Even Shuster’s own father, former congressman Bud Shuster, opposed NAFTA and warned that Bill Clinton’s free-trade juggernaut would extinguish manufacturing from central Pennsylvania,” he wrote. “That’s precisely what happened.”
Less than a year after he voted for fast-track authority to negotiate the Pacific deal, Bill Shuster expressed reservations about the plan, which has yet to be finalized or approved. Speaking after the Blair Companies visit, he said he could already identify portions that wouldn’t be in America’s interest.
“Everybody is going ‘Whoa’ and looking at it. I’m very concerned that we are making bad deals,” he said.
Frustration and anger
The fight, both nationally and locally, goes beyond simple free-trade deals. Other issues – including a dispute over the poorly understood Export-Import Bank of the United States – have cropped up as Shuster and Halvorson battle for the 9th District.
The government agency, which for more than 80 years has financed and insured foreign purchases of American goods, became a flashpoint last year when conservative Republicans in Congress called for its elimination. Halvorson has called the bank an example of crony capitalism, using taxpayer money to prop up huge corporations that don’t need the help.
Shuster played a central role in ensuring the bank’s continued existence, rolling its reauthorization into his highway funding bill that Obama signed in December.
Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supported Shuster’s efforts, even running local TV ads calling on voters to thank him for preserving the bank. Before the audience of Blair Companies employees Tuesday, Taylor, the chamber official, thanked Shuster for keeping the agency afloat.
In the same speech, Taylor praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the idea of tax repatriation, under which American companies could bring their foreign-held funds back to America for a one-time reduced tax rate. Shuster had discussed repatriation as a temporary means to fund the nation’s highway last year.
Trade and business disagreements permeate this year’s campaign, even in issues on which Shuster and Halvorson ostensibly agree. This week, when Shuster announced his opposition to a proposed Canadian Pacific Railway takeover of Norfolk Southern Railway, Halvorson slammed him for not doing so earlier.
While neither candidate has taken up the openly protectionist views of Trump and his allies, the fear of “bad deals” has had a clear effect on the race.
That view was on display Tuesday, when Shuster addressed the Blair Companies workers in Altoona.
“I know there’s a lot of frustration and anger among the people of America, of the 9th Congressional District,” he said. “I feel it, too.”
Mirror Staff Writer Ryan Brown is at 946-7457.