--- title: Can Elizabeth Warren Kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership? description: Fiery liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren is targeting a provision in President Obama's free trade deal, but will it be enough to sink it? canonical: https://time.com/3851113/elizabeth-warren-tpp/ author: Haley Sweetland Edwards article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-05-08T02:15:58.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T07:02:19.217Z article:section: Politics og:title: Can Elizabeth Warren Kill President Obama's Trade Deal? og:description: She's targeting a part of the deal, but it might not make a difference. og:url: https://time.com/3851113/elizabeth-warren-tpp/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltca4f63bc9233cfd7/6987823af887dc0a25e8a71b/elizabeth-warren.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: Elizabeth Warren og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Can Elizabeth Warren Kill President Obama's Trade Deal? twitter:description: She's targeting a part of the deal, but it might not make a difference. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltca4f63bc9233cfd7/6987823af887dc0a25e8a71b/elizabeth-warren.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Can Elizabeth Warren Kill President Obama's Trade Deal? > Sponsored content. 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Brief is TIME's Washington newsletter, written by senior correspondent Philip Elliott. It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, three times a week. It reaches 85,000 subscribers with a 37.0% open rate as of August 2026. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters.  by [Haley Sweetland Edwards](https://time.com/author/haley-sweetland-edwards/)  ## Haley Sweetland Edwards May 8, 2015 2:15 AM UTC  Sen. Elizabeth Warren listens to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen testify during a hearing on Feb. 24, 2015\. (Kevin Lamarque—Reuters) Sen. Elizabeth Warren listens to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen testify during a hearing on Feb. 24, 2015\. (Kevin Lamarque—Reuters)Kevin Lamarque—Reuters  by [Haley Sweetland Edwards](https://time.com/author/haley-sweetland-edwards/)  ## Haley Sweetland Edwards May 8, 2015 2:15 AM UTC Elizabeth Warren, the famously fiery populist senator from Massachusetts, has a reputation for having a bit of a reverse-Midas touch, when she wants to: if she decides she is against something, it often turns to smoke. The [latest subject](http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9%5Fstory.html) of her withering glare? In [a letter to supporters](http://m.elizabethwarren.com/blog/i-agree-with-hillary-clinton) Thursday afternoon, Warren decried a sub-chapter in the Obama administration’s proposed trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that would allow companies to sue foreign countries through an extra-judicial tribunal made up of three for-profit arbitrators. If that sounds a little hard-to-follow, that’s because it is. But Warren’s street cred with liberals is strong enough that they tend to take her lead even when the argument can’t be summed up in a simple bumper sticker slogan. Provisions for these tribunals — known as an investor-state dispute system, or ISDS — have appeared in more than 3,000 trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, since the 1950s, [according](https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/02/26/investor-state-dispute-settlement-isds-questions-and-answers) to Jeff Zients, the director of the National Economic Council. But Warren argues that it’s different this time around. For one, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is enormous. It includes the U.S. and 11 other countries, including Japan, Australia and Chile, oversees a whopping 40% of the world’s total annual GDP, and it’s irreversible: once we’re in it, there’s no getting out. And for another, she claims that ISDS isn’t what it used to be. Two decades ago, when NAFTA was ratified, multi-national corporations were smaller and less powerful than they are today. Her case is that as those interests have gotten bigger and bigger, they’ve gotten more litigious: in the four decades from 1959 to 2002, there were fewer than 100 ISDS cases world wide. Between 2010 and 2013 alone, there were more than 200\. “Recent cases include a French company that sued Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage, a Swedish company that sued Germany because Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, and a Dutch company that sued the Czech Republic because the Czechs didn’t bail out a bank that the company partially owned,” she wrote in a Washington _Post_ op-ed this winter. In February, John Oliver, the Comedy Central comedian and host of _Last Week Tonight_ who also holds sway with liberals, [mocked](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8) an effort by the tobacco company, Philip Morris, to use ISDS to reverse public health regulations in Uruguay’s designed to reduce the smoking rate. President Obama, backed by most Republicans, a majority of Democrats, and the powerful corporate interest groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, says Warren is just plain [wrong](http://time.com/3830449/barack-obama-elizabeth-warren-trade-deal/). (He’ll be at Nike’s headquarters in Oregon on Friday [explaining](http://time.com/3850206/obama-nike-free-trade-tpp/) why the TPP is great.) ISDS is necessary, the deal’s backers argue, to ensure the corporations feel comfortable making direct foreign investments in other countries — particularly those with less well developed court systems. But policy arguments aside for a moment, will the famous Warren touch work this time around? In the past, Warren has been successful in taking down very narrow targets. Last fall, she set her sights on Antonio Weiss, the White House’s nominee for Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, and by January, he’d bowed out. Before that, Warren helped doom Obama’s plan to nominate former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve. But Warren’s also had some off-days. She failed, for example, in her effort last December to quash Congress’s unwieldy continuing resolution and omnibus bill — nicknamed the “Cromnibus” — which included provisions that unwound financial regulations. And the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for better or worse, may have more in common with the latter than the former. Like the Cromnibus, the TPP is huge, unwieldy, and also includes provisions that many Democrats will like. Plus, there are technical difficulties. If Congress passes what’s known as the “fast-track” bill next week — it’s unclear if they currently have the votes they need — there won’t be any room for debate about which parts to keep, rewrite, amend or scrap. The fast-track bill binds Congress into an up or down vote on the final version of the trade deal. And if it comes down to a simple “yes” or “no,” Warren’s famous touch, however powerful, might not be enough. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3851113/elizabeth-warren-tpp/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3851113/elizabeth-warren-tpp/"},"headline":"Can Elizabeth Warren Kill President Obama's Trade Deal?","datePublished":"2015-05-08T02:15:58.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-22T07:02:19.217Z","description":"Fiery liberal Sen. 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