The Senate
passed the bill to curb Chinese currency manipulation Tuesday evening on a 63-35 vote. Four Democrats and Joe Lieberman voted against, and 16 Republicans voted in favor. Now the question is, will House Republican leadership bring it to a vote? John Boehner, remember, thinks it's "
pretty dangerous," and while a similar bill in the House got
99 Republican votes in 2010, so far, a discharge petition to force a House vote has collected 175 Democratic signatures and none from Republicans.
Opponents of the bill suggest that it would "start a trade war with China"; Paul Krugman, though, has argued forcefully that it would strengthen the U.S. economy, and there's a great deal of evidence that Chinese currency manipulation is already doing serious damage to the economy and costing us millions of jobs. So when The Hill says that "Under both Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, Treasury has argued that it much prefers to manage the issue with China," you have to think "but you're not managing it effectively, so isn't it time to try something else?"
Even without a House vote, Senate passage of the bill puts pressure on China, and:
This has been part of Treasury’s management job for several years now — to parlay the congressional threat of passage into progress on China’s end. This year, as in others, China has reacted by allowing the yuan to appreciate more quickly — it jumped 0.6 percent earlier this week, the largest daily increase since China officially unpegged the yuan from the dollar in 2005.
Pressure will produce some gradual change, for now. As Krugman wrote, though, "gradually" isn't really good enough with the American economy in the shape it's in. The big question, then, is whether political pressure within the U.S. as elections approach will persuade House Republican leadership to bring the bill to a vote.