The 116th Congress won't begin for another month or so, but we already know the session's most important vote. It won't be about health care or the environment or the technology industry, although it will affect all of those things. It will set the course of U.S. policy, foreign and domestic, for several years, if not decades. And it got very little attention during the midterm campaign.
I'm talking about the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the renegotiation of NAFTA that was signed October 1. All participating countries in the deal must ratify it through their legislatures, and with the Democratic takeover of the House, that means the party that rode to victory resisting Donald Trump must decide whether to approve his reimagining of global trade. Since USMCA will serve as a template for future trade deals, the decision will define the United States' role in the world, at least from an economic perspective, for a long time to come.
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