Supreme Court makes right call on NAFTA
Wednesday, June 9, 2004 7:05 AM PDT
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E-mail this articleThe United States is free to live up to live up to its responsibilities under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Supreme Court this week swept aside the last remaining obstacle to opening U.S. roadways to Mexican truckers, as promised in the 1993 treaty.
The justices ruled unanimously that the president has the authority to open the nation's border to Mexican trucking. The government agency responsible for truck safety has no voice in the matter, the justices said, rendering moot the $1.8 million environmental study the lower court had ordered it to undertake.
The environment was never the chief concern of those opposed to opening the border to Mexican trucking. Neither was safety. Fear of competition drove the opposition.
The Teamsters and the consumer group Public Citizen were prime movers in the long campaign to restrict Mexican truckers' access to U.S. roads. The groups were joined in their lawsuit by nine states. Oddly, Washington -- one of the nation's most trade-dependent states -- was among them.
This state is better off having lost the ill-advised attempt to rewrite NAFTA in the courts. So is the nation, as a whole.
Certainly Mexico can applaud the high court's decision. Mexico says restricting Mexican trucks to within 20 miles of the border has cost the country more than $2 billion over the past decade.
That restricted access has been both unfair and unnecessary. Unfair because it robbed Mexico -- and, to a lesser extent, U.S. consumers -- of benefits promised under NAFTA. Unnecessary because the safety and pollution issues raised by its proponents are largely baseless.
Mexican truckers must meet the same safety and performance standards as U.S. truckers.
If Mexican trucks were being hit with a high number of safety violations at the border, as the Teamsters union claimed, it was because the restricted access encouraged the use of older, short-haul trucks. We can expect the number of citations to fall, as the restriction ends and the use of Mexico's modern, long-haul trucks becomes economically feasible.
It's good to see this protectionist policy fall so hard in a 9-0 Supreme Court decision. It's not in our best interest to continue violating a treaty that so greatly benefits our economy.
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