There's just way too much to unpack in the article, but here's a snippet: They sure may have a double-standard, but that doesn't mean pointing out the secret negotiations is a bad argument. In fact, it's a good one, because the reason why any legislation is negotiated in secret is precisely that it's against our interests. Otherwise they'd have no problem being transparent about what they're planning.The arguments Democrats use against the deal are small and inadequate. Some Democrats are suspicious because it was negotiated in secret. (They seem to have no trouble with the Iranian nuclear treaty, which is also negotiated in secret.)
That's naïve. The reason treaties are negotiated in secret is to prevent outside interference with the negotiation process. If a third-party piped in against the Nuclear treaty all the time with little concerns that don't actually need to be discussed at the time but may be popular enough to detract from the main issue, the process will suffer. This is acceptable in a state level treaty and is one of the primary useful purposes of a federal government argued for all the way back to the Federalist Papers. In terms of using it to negotiate a trade treaty it attempts to do the same thing by preventing outside interference. In this situation it is unacceptable as the parties involved do not have national security interests and are instead only working to prevent their own private interests from being tampered with. The idea that this is a double standard as proposed by the author is stupid. They are different applications of the same idea, and deserve separate standards of use.
That's disingenuous. They're making decisions that affect the lives of 6 billion people. If they had good intentions, they would keep the masses updated on what's happening, and they would respond to our concerns. It's not like we're in a position to interfere with the negotiations anyway.That's naïve. The reason treaties are negotiated in secret is to prevent outside interference with the negotiation process.