Sixteen years ago today, 171 Democrats and 71 GOP Representatives united to vote down then-President Bill Clinton's request for Fast Track authority. As President Barack Obama now seeks to revive the extreme Nixon-era trade procedure, the 1998 Fast Track smackdown is worth remembering.

You’ve probably heard of offshoring: the flow of manufacturing and service functions and jobs to countries outside the United States. Companies seeking to reduce the cost of labor and materials moved factories from Northeastern states to Southeastern states as early as the 1880s; by the 1920s, the New England textile mills had almost all been shut down. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994, hundreds of operations and as many as 700,000 manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico. During the early 2000s, many thousands more jobs moved to Southeast Asia and India and eventually to China.