The home team trails in the third quarter as the underdog visitors steadily advance the ball. Coaches are nervous; fans are grumbling. Desperate for a turnaround, the home team announces a surprise rule change: From now on, the visitors are banned from crossing the 50-yard line.
Sounds absurd, but that’s what Congress proposes to do with NAFTA, the free-trade accord it approved in 1993. Sure, NAFTA might not be a crowd pleaser. It is, however, a treaty that legally binds the United States. The rules don’t change just because the home team is in trouble.
NAFTA has always included provisions to grant U.S., Mexican and Canadian truckers access to one another’s shipping routes. Bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress, yielding to pressure from the Teamsters, voted last week to halt a year-old pilot program that allowed a few dozen properly inspected, safe Mexican trucks to haul cargo deep within U.S. territory.
Short of using actual facts, the Teamsters and truckers groups have done everything possible to feed the worst stereotypes about the dangers of Mexican trucks on U.S. highways.
It’s harder when facts get in the way:
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