ral, trans-national panels to resolve disputes. U.S. trade adjustment assistance would be available to assist American workers deemed to have been displaced as a result of NAFTA.
NAFTA expired by its terms at the end of 1993. According to Lauter, "under rules governing congressional consideration of trade agreements, Congress [had] 90 days to vote the agreement up or down. Because the pact is an agreement rather than a formal treaty, it requires a majority vote in both houses of Congress" (A 18). NAFTA was approved by the House of Representatives by a vote of 234-200 on November 17, 1993 and by the Senate on November 21, 1993 by a vote of 61-38. After it was ratified by Canada and Mexico, it became effective on January 1, 1994.
For more than 60 years before NAFTA, major international free trade and tariff reduction agreements had sailed through Congress with bipartisan support and little opposition. Historically, the Democratic Party had supported low tariffs and free trade and the Republicans in the 19th and early 20th century had espoused economic nationalism and protective tariffs. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, a serious split developed within the Democratic Party on international trade issues. The leadership and the neo-liberal or white collar wing of the party, "challenged the view that American industry needed protection" (Baker B 7). Organized labor had increasingly opposed free trade agreements which it viewed as destructive of America's manufacturing base, blue collar employment and wage levels.
Candidate Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign qualified his support for NAFTA by stating that it would have to be renegotiated by means of side agreements with Mexico and Canada, largely of the window dressing variety, to assuage public concerns relating to environmental pollution and labor standards, which his Special Trade Representative, Mickey Kantor, accomplished during the summer of 1993. Even then, Woodward ...