Mara Lee

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., told an Atlantic Council webinar that although business executives have told the bipartisan Climate Caucus that they want a carbon tax, it's more likely that a carbon adjustment tax would come first in Congress. Coons, speaking Aug. 3, said, “It seems that we may actually be able to move first, to assessing what the regulatory price already is on carbon in our economy and setting a border carbon adjustment” tax. He said it makes sense to work on that now because Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union are all planning similar strategies.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill being debated in the Senate this week invests $17 billion in port infrastructure, according to a White House summary of the more than 2,000-page bill. That money would go to maintenance backlogs, emissions and congestion near ports, and for electrification and other low-carbon technologies at ports of entry. It also invests $25 billion in airports.

A Senate bill that would create an export certification system for Native American cultural items passed out of the Indian Affairs Committee July 28. The bill, which was introduced by Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., also has a House companion bill, called the Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony Act of 2021. In addition to the export certification system, it explicitly prohibits the export of Native American cultural items that were illegally obtained, and requires that the Interior Department convene a Native working group of Indian tribe and Native Hawaiian representatives “to provide advice on issues concerning the return of, and illegal trade in, human remains and cultural items.”

The shift from NAFTA to USMCA has been taxing for vehicle manufacturing sector companies, panelists on a KPMG seminar said about the trade deal, one year in. But for Georgia-Pacific, compliance is simpler after the rewrite. Myesha Cottom, director of international trade at Georgia-Pacific, said that getting rid of the template for NAFTA goods and going to minimum data elements means less administrative burden. "I’m optimistic that the administrative burden will continue to decrease," she said during the July 28 webinar.

Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., along with two other House Republicans, introduced a bill that would require the administration to impose sanctions on "persons who are knowingly responsible for or complicit in, or have directly or indirectly engaged in, supporting the illegal occupation of Tibet." The bill's text was published July 26. "In rejecting the seven-decade long illegal occupation of Tibet by the forces of the Chinese Communist Party, the United States of America would provide relief to a long-suffering people and reinforce its reputation as a strident defender of global human rights," the bill says. The bill says that the administration would be required to impose the sanctions within 180 days of the bill becoming law, unless the president says that not applying sanctions to a certain party is in the national interest of the U.S. In that case, he would have to give Congress a justification for the waiver.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told an audience at the U.S.-Africa Business Summit that she wants to meet with her African counterparts later this year "to discuss how we can build on the successes of the African Growth and Opportunity Act." The meeting will be virtual, she said. She said she wants to talk about anticorruption, good regulatory practices and labor and environmental standards with other top trade officials. "As we continue to develop our trade policy with respect to Africa, I also want to hear from businesses, civic organizations, labor leaders, and workers. There are far too many communities that have been left out from trade, labor, and development policy that was enacted without their input," she said in a speech July 27. She also offered technical assistance to countries implementing the African Continental Free Trade Area.

Congress should establish a rebuttable presumption that certain technology exports sold to China will be used to violate human rights, said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J. Malinowski, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he pushed to include that language in a previous House version of the Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement (EAGLE) Act but the wording “kept on getting stripped by the Senate” for “mysterious” reasons. “There is a very strong behind-the-scenes lobby against that from whatever elements of corporate America continue to profit from that trade,” Malinowski said in a Capitol hallway interview July 27, specifically pointing to facial recognition technology.

Although there were some specific complaints about how USMCA has gone in its first year -- especially what witnesses and senators said was an anemic effort to get Mexico to change its stance on genetically modified agricultural crops -- much of the hearing in the Senate Finance Committee on July 27 explored how USMCA should be seen as a model for future trade agreements.

The International Dairy Foods Association is asking the European Commission and U.S. government to work together to resolve a dispute about animal health attestations that the trade group says will throw the infant formula and adult nutrition supply chains "into chaos," and will cause product shortages and price increases.

Mexico's Economy Secretary, Tatiana Clouthier, said she talked about Mexico's concerns about the auto rules of origin with the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the ranking members of that committee and of the Senate Finance Committee, two other Republican senators, and four business groups, including two auto manufacturing trade groups, as well as a major aerospace manufacturer.