Most common-sense people rightly assume that establishing stable uniform rules of engagement and reducing trade barriers is good in and of itself.

But it’s a mistake to think that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) involving 11 countries in addition to the U.S. — which is close to being concluded after six-plus years of negotiation under the Obama administration — is only a free trade pact.

It’s also a misstep to grant the Obama administration with fast-track authority and the attendant secrecy on all details of this trade pact.

The experience with Obama’s Affordable Care Act, his executive order on immigration and his ongoing nuclear agreement negotiations with Iran remind us that the devil in the details, once passed and implemented, can be harmful and problematic to correct.

TPP has beneficial objectives such as opening up Japan’s highly restricted agricultural markets to more imports from the U.S., strengthening intellectual property protection and providing a counterbalance to China’s rising economic influence.

But as details of the trade pact get leaked, it’s becoming apparent trade liberalization may be only part of TPP. Much of the agreement’s language appears to be devoted to establishing global authoritarian decision-making on environmental, energy, labor and immigration policy.

As for trade policy, TPP would give multinational corporations new powers that would circumvent American sovereignty and transfer the negotiation and implementation into the hands of stateless and faceless regulators and bureaucrats, and away from congressional representatives and state legislators.

Trade policy would then become more remote and opaque, with new legal impediments blocking American prerogatives in regulating and controlling U.S. markets.

Obama’s executive orders have already stripped from Congress much of its authority over immigration, carbon emissions and the environment. Why help him further extend the transfer of power to supranational bodies and expand the Obama doctrine — tenets of which include leading from behind, downsizing and subordinating America to a new international order by engaging the world through international rather than American institutions?

Indeed, it may be that Obama’s enthusiasm for TPP is less about trade expansion and more about advancing the next steps of his political agenda.

For instance, leaked parts of TPP show that the agreement enables multinational corporations to end-run around U.S. laws. The agreement imposes environmental regulations, such as those dealing with so-called climate change,that would likely be at variance with and trump those established by U.S. lawmakers.

TPP may also establish a regime with the power to override congressional actions imposing restrictions on the “free flow of labor” between the U.S. and Mexico.

Make no mistake: The longstanding goal of globalists is international rule by elitists and their bureaucrats unencumbered by fickle and changing democratic rule by sovereign states.

No doubt some multinational corporate titans embrace TPP because of their success with regulatory capture of U.S. regulators, and assume that international bureaucrats would also be relatively easy to control — helped by the revolving door between regulatory bodies and the corporations they regulate.

In the past under previous presidents, fast-track trade negotiations and agreements made sense, particularly when a multitude of tariffs existed before the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995.

But in the last two decades, tariffs have been greatly reduced, making trade deals more vulnerable to control by globalists and special-interest power politicians whose agendas transcend the reduction of economic barriers.

President Obama has already largely overturned the U.S. constitutional system of checks and balances, and dissipated much of America’s former international power and prestige. Why the Republican-controlled Senate recently passed the fast-track provision to advance Obama’s secretive trade pact is an enigma.

But now House members need to get out from under the illusion that TPP is primarily about expanding free trade. Above all, it’s time to reject the Obama doctrine and crony internationalist politics, and stand for strengthening the sovereign institutions and laws of the U.S. and the interests of its citizens.

Originally published at Investor’s Business Daily.