Exclusive — Jeff Sessions To Debate Moderators: You Must Ask Candidates About Whether They Support Obamatrade

[HAPPY2BME]

28 Jan 2016

DES MOINES, Iowa — Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) , the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, is calling on Fox News debate moderators Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier and Chris Wallace to ask the GOP presidential candidates where they stand on Obamatrade.

“It absolutely is a critical issue for the future of America,” Sessions told Breitbart News in an exclusive phone interview late last week.

    This is no little matter that needs to be decided in some secret room and secret negotiations. I don’t see how anybody that conducts a debate can fail to ask about this critical issue. It affects the long-term financial well-being of this country. People need to know how every one of these candidates, Republican and Democrat, feel about the trade agreements—and particularly the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic agreement and the Trade in Services Agreement. Are you for them or not? Then they [voters] can decide how to cast their vote. Isn’t that what debates are supposed to be about? To give the candidates a chance to explain how they feel and how they are going to conduct themselves if elected? I think it’s a huge matter.

Sessions noted the reason why these trade agreements should be a major focus of this final debate before the Iowa caucuses is because of the impact this issue will have on American workers and American sovereignty moving forward.

“This trade agreement would provide—this Trans Pacific agreement commission for example would provide—the Sultan of Brunei with the same vote as the President of the United States,” Sessions said.

    The President could go and agree to the various things he might want to see happen like President Obama would agree to expanded immigration and Congress would be powerless to stop it. It would just create a situation where it would be very difficult for the people’s voice to be heard. They go off and have some meeting somewhere to come up with these agreements and it avoids the legislative process the Constitution sets forth.

Obamatrade is the intersection of and combination of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) with the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), and Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TPA, which was forced through Congress by now House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) last year, is fast-track authority that greases the skids for the passage of trade deals like TPP, T-TIP and TiSA through Congress by lowering Senate vote thresholds to 51 from 60 and killing the ability for Congress to offer amendments to the deals.

TPP is a 5,544-page-long trade deal with a variety of Pacific Rim nations including Japan, Vietnam and Brunei. T-TIP is a similar deal with various European nations. TiSA is a worldwide deal. Together, they would bind the United States to various global commissions that threaten U.S. sovereignty.

It’s unclear if Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier or Chris Wallace will actually ask candidates where they stand on this issue. While trade has come up in a minor way in recent debates, it has not received the central focus Sessions—the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement—believes it should have.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was originally in favor of Obamatrade—he voted for TPA the first go-around in the U.S. Senate in 2015—but after withering public scrutiny he flipped against it and voted against TPA the second go-around. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), meanwhile, helped Ryan champion Obamatrade’s cause. On the second go-around in the Senate, Rubio was the critical 60th vote for the TPA.

Rubio claims he read the text of TPP, which was kept in a secret room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol, before he voted for TPA to fast-track it. But Rubio has for more than six months now refused to detail exactly when he went to the secret room to read TPP text and exactly how long he spent there. Since the final deal is again 5,544 pages long, for Rubio to have actually read the text of TPP before voting TPA—again, he would have needed to read it inside that secret classified reading room—he would have had to spend at least several days in there, something it’s highly unlikely he did. What’s more, Donald Trump says he doesn’t believe Rubio’s claim he went to the room to read the deal text–and nobody has ever asked Rubio the question one on one.

Fox News moderators could easily clarify this if they wanted to on Thursday evening during the debate by asking Rubio which full days he spent inside the classified reading room, but since—as  Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowksi exposed on Wednesday—the Fox News executive writing debate questions has a daughter working for the Rubio campaign it’s unclear if Rubio will face any real questions at all.

Moreover, while Rubio previously stated he supports TPP passage in addition to having voted for TPA, he now says he is waiting until after most Republicans vote in primaries and caucuses nationwide in the presidential election before he takes a formal position again.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), meanwhile, has been steadfastly opposed to the Obamatrade pacts. He fought alongside Sessions against the TPA and TPP in the Senate, one of only a handful of Republicans willing to stand up to the donor class on this issue from the very beginning.

Donald Trump, the looming frontrunner who won’t be on stage on Thursday night because of his feud with Fox News and will instead be hosting his own veterans benefit across town, has also always been steadfastly opposed to Obamatrade.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is opposed to Obamatrade too, saying he doesn’t “trust” Obama to do this correctly. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, meanwhile, stands with Rubio’s original position to say he thinks Obamatrade—and specifically TPP—is “critical.” Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also supports TPP.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/28/exclusive-jeff-sessions-to-debate-moderators-you-must-ask-candidates-about-whether-they-support-obamatrade/

[HAPPY2BME]

29 Jan 2016

Fox News Fails to Ask Marco Rubio About His Support for Murdoch-Endorsed Obamatrade


In the seventh straight debate, and the fourth debate hosted by Fox, moderators again failed to ask Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) about his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Not once during the two-hour debate did Megyn Kelly and her fellow moderators ask donor-class favorite Marco Rubio about his longstanding support for President Barack Obama’s trade agenda. It was the last debate before the Iowa caucus. Failure to ask any questions about the TPP is especially noteworthy since Obamatrade has also been endorsed by Fox News’s founder, Rupert Murdoch.

Rubio has previously endorsed Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement—describing it as the “second pillar” of a President Rubio’s three-pillared foreign policy platform, and he voted to fast-track it over the summer. Bizarrely, in recent weeks Rubio has said that he will not reveal how he will ultimately vote on the deal he endorsed until May 18th, or later.

This means that Rubio is now refusing to tell Republican voters whether he will vote for Obama’s trade deal until two months after Super Tuesday—i.e. after 44 states have already voted and Republican voters can no longer make their voices heard on the matter.

As Breitbart News has previously reported, Fox News’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, has endorsed President Obama’s trade agenda. In May of last year, Murdoch joined executives at Goldmann Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley in signing a letter urging Congress to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

In stark contrast to Marco Rubio—who has outlined how the globalist trade deal is essential to his desire to bring about a “New American Century”—GOP frontrunner Donald Trump has made his opposition to “one-sided,” international trade deals a central plank of his conservative nationalism.

While Murdoch supports TPP, by a nearly five-to-one margin Republican voters believe that these so-called free trade deals reduce wages rather than raise them.

With respect to Murdoch’s network in particular, the Trump campaign highlighted a separate concern earlier this week. Namely, Trump’s campaign manager pointed out that Fox News’s vice president of news and Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, is the father of Marco Rubio’s press secretary, Brooke Sammon.

“The Fox News executive who oversees the debate process, [his] daughter is a senior executive on the Marco Rubio campaign,” Trump’s campaign manager told CNN. “He’s one of the executives on Fox that writes the debate questions so maybe he has his own ulterior motives… maybe he should disclose that before he’s writing the debate questions for Fox.”

Anti-amnesty blogger Mickey Kaus mocked the conflict of interest on his Twitter page. Linking to a blog post that features a transcript of Chris Stirewalt explaining that Sammon is Fox’s “secret weapon… in crafting the questions,” Kaus tweeted:

    It’s almost as if Fox honcho Bill Sammon’s daughter is a Rubio flack! At least he doesn’t write debate questions. Oh https://t.co/imsXrRkt7q

    — Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) January 27, 2016

Prior to last night’s debate, Kaus tweeted about the first Fox News debate:

    I’d think the Sammon/Sammon Fox/Rubio conflict is trivial–we’re all professionals in #thistown, etc.–except that I, um, watched the debate

    — Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) January 27, 2016

After last night’s debate in which Rubio was not asked about his support for Obama’s trade agenda, the political class immediately began to pronounce Rubio as the winner of the debate. GOP pollster Frank Luntz tweeted:

    This is @MarcoRubio‘s best debate so far. He’s making people switch over to him.#GOPDebate

    — Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) January 29, 2016

Prior to the debate, Ann Coulter predicted that Fox, which she described as “implacably pro-open borders, pro-amnesty and, consequently, anti-Trump,” would inevitably declare Rubio to be the winner.

    After each of the six debates, Fox News commentators, hosts, analysts, focus groups and body language experts all crapped on Trump and proclaimed pro-amnesty Rubio the winner. (By the fourth debate, I began playing “Carnac the Magnificent” on Twitter, predicting “Marco Rubio” to the question, “Who will Fox News claim won the debate?”).

However, as Breitbart’s Patrick Howley reported Friday, Frank Luntz had previously been on Rubio’s payroll, a fact which Fox did not disclose to its viewers:

    Fox News used a pollster to host a pro-Sen. Marco Rubio focus group after Thursday night’s Republican debate, despite the fact that the pollster actually had Rubio as a client. Pollster Frank Luntz got significant airtime to direct a post-debate focus group that unsurprisingly was very favorable to Rubio, the GOP establishment pick in the primary race… Rubio actually had Luntz on his payroll at one time. Rubio hired Luntz to work on a document called ‘100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future.’ Fox News did not disclose Luntz’s past business relationship with Rubio Thursday night.

Interestingly, as Breitbart News reported last year, in the past, Luntz has previously advised Republican lawmakers on “how to deceive Americans into believing [the Obama-Ryan] trade deal is a good thing—when even Luntz’s polling data shows widespread opposition to it,” Breitbart wrote.

Luntz’s polling data—which was not intended to be available to the public—found that, “An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that ‘international trade’ benefits ‘other countries,’ not the United States. Luntz asked respondents: ‘Do free trade agreements [t]he U.S. has signed with other countries over the past 2 decades benefit other countries or the United States?’ A whopping 70 percent said other countries, while just 30 percent said the U.S.”

Based on this data, Luntz told Republicans on Capitol Hill that they ought to give globalist trade deals a “name change”: “’International Trade’ Needs A Name Change… because they [the American people] associate it with benefiting other countries—not the U.S.”

Luntz’s data seems to underscore the significance of the news networks’s decision not to press Rubio on his support for these international trade deals.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/29/fox-news-fails-ask-marco-rubio-support-murdoch-endorsed-obamatrade/

[HAPPY2BME]

Pay attention to what an elitist globalist asked candidates in the debates that led up to the Primary.

Pay attention to what they ask between now and the General.

Pay CLOSER attention to the questions they DON'T ASK.

The questions they don't ask, hide the real answers.