Dana Rohrabacher: “As this debate goes on, let me again stress what we are talking about, and I do agree with my colleague, the gentlewoman…”

“As this debate goes on, let me again stress what we are talking about, and I do agree with my colleague, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Sanchez), that the legal essence of what is being talked about today is whether or not we should grant normal trade relations and whether or not, and this should be based on emigration policy. As she said, even in the emigration area, the Communist dictatorship in Vietnam has not measured up to what it should and, in fact, I cannot believe, and I am sure she agrees, that those Vietnamese who are being victimized by the extortion of this dictatorship, that this extortion is not going on without the knowledge of the dictatorship, without the acknowledgment and probably the profiteering of the very people that we want to make this great relationship with. This is not a debate about whether or not we should have a good relationship with the Vietnamese people. It is what kind of relationship we will have with the government of Vietnam, a government which is a Communist dictatorship, which arrests anyone who speaks up against it, a government that extorts, as we have heard on the floor today, extorts money from would-be immigrants, a government that plays games and continues to play games with our POWs and the bodies of our brave soldiers and airmen and Marines from 20 years ago. What type of relationship do we want to have with them?”