Bill Clinton: “First of all, the main thing that's wrong with it is that other countries aren't interested in negotiating with us this…”

“First of all, the main thing that's wrong with it is that other countries aren't interested in negotiating with us this way. No other country has to face that. Every country recognizes that a nation's parliamentary body has the right to vote up or down on the action by the executive. But no one--these deals are very complicated to negotiate; there are always lots of different aspects to it. And you can't say, ``Well, we're going to negotiate it and then subject it to a thousand amendments.'' Even within this framework there are ways to deal with major concerns. But I asked Ambassador Barshefsky last night, I said, ``Just tell me one more time, do you really think we can negotiate seriously with any country without this authority?'' And she said, ``No. Unambiguously no.'' Let me emphasize, however, something we have done in this. Because I think it's very important, and it's been completely lost in the debate. We have agreed to have congressional observer groups in every single trade negotiation the way we have congressional observer groups now on NATO expansion, the way we have a congressional observer group on the chemical weapons treaty. Any Member of Congress who has ever been on one of those observer groups will tell you that that dramatically increases the effective input of the Congress into the process on the front end. And we have agreed to very specific stages of involvement for the Congress here. And presumably, the observer group in the trade issues would be just like the observer group in NATO. It would include people who are strongly for what we are doing, people who are skeptical, people who may be opposed. All of them get their input. You know, I took a number of the congressional observers with me to Madrid, to the NATO conference. I would expect that to be done on all these trade issues. So we have offered Congress, including those who have reservations about certain trade agreements, an unprecedented amount of input on the front end into this process. I strongly support it, by the way. I think it is a good idea, but it ought to be recognized for what it is. The question that Congress should ask themselves is, are we going to have more or less influence over trade policy if this bill passes? Are we going to have more or less input in labor and environmental issues and more advance of that if this bill passes or if it fails? The answer is, more influence in other countries on labor and environmental issues, more input for Congress if the bill passes. No fast-track legislation has ever proposed this before. I support it. My policy is to push the labor and environmental issues. My policy is to push congressional involvement. And my policy is to do more at home to help people who are dislocated from their jobs for whatever reason. But that is not an excuse to send a signal to the world that we just don't expect to do trade agreements anymore with other countries and we don't expect to be partners. And other countries do not understand--what is America afraid of? No other country has 13\1/2\ million jobs in the last 5 years. No other country has a 4.7 percent unemployment rate, except for Japan, which has a different system, as you know. This country has outperformed every other country in the world, and the 220 trade agreements that we negotiated had a lot to do with that. Our barriers are lower on average than virtually every other country in the world. We have more to gain from this economically. What they want is the sort of long-term, stable political relationships that will stabilize democracy and guarantee long-term economic growth for them and give them access to high-quality products. This is a no-brainer on the merits. This is clear on the merits. And it is in the interest of working people, and it is especially in the interest of working people who either have or want to get higher wage jobs, because they are the jobs that are created by the expansion of trade. One of the reasons you've got these income figures going up now is not only that unemployment is low and therefore the labor markets are tighter but we are slowly changing the job mix in America because as we get into more trade, trade-related jobs pay higher wages. So this is clearly the right thing to do, and I'm determined to keep working until we convince a majority of the House of Representatives that it is. Thank you.”