This article originally appeared on Fox News on January 21, 2020.
It’s hard to imagine a more vivid or disturbing illustration of the situation in Washington, D.C. than what we have seen in Congress. While Democrats have kept up their never-ending crusade to remove President Trump from office, Republicans are helping the president fulfill yet another promise to the American people.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., finally abandoned her perplexing strategy of withholding the politically motivated articles of impeachment her party approved without a single Republican vote ending nearly a month-long delay. Democrats were downright giddy, and Pelosi herself marked the supposedly “solemn” occasion by handing out golden pens on silver platters to commemorate the historic moment.
While Pelosi’s hand-picked impeachment managers anxiously waited in the wings for their chance to formally present the articles to the upper chamber, though, the GOP-majority Senate was attending to more important business: approving the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a bipartisan measure that Pelosi had kept in legislative limbo for even longer than she impounded the articles of impeachment.
The 89 senators who voted to send the USMCA to the president’s desk for a signature didn’t have much chance to revel in that accomplishment the way their House colleagues did after finalizing impeachment. Almost as soon as they finished voting, the lead Democratic impeachment manager, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., took the floor to recite his party’s partisan and highly politicized charges against President Trump.
House Democrats were well aware that cheering for impeachment would make for bad optics, but they just couldn’t help themselves — after all, this is something most of them have been trying to achieve from the moment Donald Trump took the oath of office. Conversely, the Senate’s approval of the USMCA came with little fanfare, even though it’s one of the most consequential deals ever negotiated on behalf of the American people.
The USMCA corrects some of the most glaring deficiencies of NAFTA, eliminating or updating provisions that had placed American workers at an artificial competitive disadvantage for decades. Once the new agreement takes effect, it is projected to boost GDP by nearly $70 billion and support the creation of 176,000 new jobs across the United States.
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