President Obama has asked Congress to provide him with the authority to consolidate multiple federal agencies, the next step on a plan announced earlier in the year to reconstitute the Commerce Department and several other agencies as a trade and economic competitiveness department.

One intriguing item that Obama announced in his State of the Union was on a Trade Enforcement Unit. I I tend to be skeptical about these enforcement agencies. But if you follow the facts, the President is correct that his Administration has been solid on bringing trade cases against China, on tires, on steel, on solar products, on rare earth minerals, and he’s gotten results.

The Internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA, bouncing around Congress don’t really work unless you apply them globally. If other countries do not vigorously protect their entertainment and high-tech industry’s copyrights in the same way as the United States, those industries will lose market share domestically. So the US has taken to pressuring other countries to pass anti-piracy laws through their legislatures. And this pressure rose to the level of threats, we have now learned from leaked letters.

Maybe this is the new big plan for the economy: sell as many weapons to the Middle East as possible. Let a million Rosie the Riveters bloom. That this buildup endangers an entire region, one holding the keys to the current energy infrastructure of the world, is just a sidelight to this, I guess.

In 2010, over 350 members of the House agreed to a bill designed to punish China for their currency manipulation. In 2011, 68 members of the Senate agreed to a similar bill. But in a year-end report to Congress, the Treasury Department voiced their disagreement, refusing to label China a currency manipulator, instead opting for softer language around their failing to “reform” currency operations.

Chief of Staff Bill Daley is giving up day-to-day operations at the White House, with Pete Rouse taking over. I’m not sure there’s anything else to the job other than day-to-day operations; that’s kind of what a Chief of Staff does, unless he’s the corporate bagman.

John Boehner has declared the China currency bill, which passed the Senate with rare bipartisan support and 63 votes, “dead on arrival” in the House. So Sen. Sherrod Brown has an op ed in Boehner’s home town paper pressuring Boehner to support the bill and explaining how exchange rates are causing Ohio to lose jobs.

While the American Jobs Act failed a cloture vote last night, the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act passed the Senate on a final vote. That bill would allow the Commerce Department to target currency manipulators like China with tariffs proportional to their currency manipulation if industries or unions file complaints. And it would force [...]

It was already clear that the House GOP wanted no part of the China currency manipulation bill working its way through the Senate, but John Boehner clinched it the other day, calling it “pretty dangerous” for lawmakers to crack down on China and their artificial lowering of the price of their exports. The Republican leadership even forced Hal Rogers, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, to take his name off the discharge petition trying to force a vote on the bill to the floor, after he initially signed it. There are currently a majority of co-sponsors for the legislation in the House, but only 175 signers of the petition after Rogers took his name off.

Yesterday, the Senate voted for cloture on a motion to proceed on a bill to discourage China’s currency manipulation, with a bipartisan 79-19 vote. But the White House would rather pursue its “free” trade bills with Columbia, Korea and Panama.