Traditionally free trade has meant the lowering and eventual elimination of barriers to trade between nations. In the course of debate, those who favor free trade are characterized as internationalists. Pulling U.S. policy in the opposite direction are the protectionists, sometimes known as isolationists, who want to raise or at least maintain trade barriers and oppose trade expansion. But that simple, one-dimensional analysis disguises the true nature of the trade debate.
As a new, Democratic Congress begins to put its tamp on U.S. trade policy, the choice before members of both major parties will not be between engagement and isolation but between the free market and government intervention. The guiding question should be whether U.S. policy favors a free international market by advancing free trade and rejecting government intervention such as export and agricultural subsidies, or whether it favors intervention by not only maintaining and raising barriers to trade but also various subsidies.
Thus the real policy choices before Congress are not the two traditional paths of engagement or isolation but four paths. Through their votes on legislation, members of Congress can
1) oppose both trade barriers and trade subsidies,
2) oppose barriers and favor subsidies,
3) favor barriers and oppose subsidies, or
4. favor both barriers and subsidies.
By considering those four policy alternatives, this biannual study of congressional voting offers a more accurate and useful way of measuring how Congress as a whole and its individual members vote on issues affecting American involvement in the global economy. It analyzes 13 major votes in the House during the recently concluded 109th Congress and another 11 in the Senate affecting both trade barriers and trade subsidies. It then classifies members of Congress according to their degree of support for an international market free from the distorting effects of barriers and subsidies. The purpose of the study is to articulate a higher standard for free trade, and to measure the performance of the most recent Congress according to that standard.