Political Quotes

“I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), with his passion on all issues. Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank my friend, the gentleman, for the time. We could, today on the floor, just replay the debate from 11 years ago in the lame-duck session about China. It's about exporting U.S. goods to China. Just get them in the WTO, give them permanent normal trade relations, and they'll follow the rules. Well, when we adopted that, our trade deficit with China was $84 billion. Today it's $295 billion. The issue isn't the tariffs the Russians have. The issue wasn't the tariffs that the Chinese had. It's all of their manipulation and nontariff barriers that go into these nonmarket economies. How is it going to be any difference with Russia? The debate is disconnected from the reality. We're concerned about Syria, so let's reward them with permanent normal trade relations. You can't go to the WTO and complain about the Russians supporting a thug who's killing his people in Syria. That's not something you can use the WTO for. We are giving up the tools we have to try and push Russia on economic issues; and we're binding ourselves to this international body, which has a secret dispute resolution process with unelected bureaucrats who have no conflict-of-interest rules. Now, that's a powerful tool we're going to use against those Russians. It worked real well against the Chinese.…”