Political Quotes

“can you imagine State and local governments saying we really do not like these international postal agreements, so we are going to enact a community postal agreement, or perhaps a statewide one; or we think there is an infringement on our sovereignty with the international air space agreements because those airplanes fly over our State, and therefore we think that State and local governments should have the right to enact their own type of agreements dealing with these subjects? Well, we are not under the Articles of Confederation, we are under the United States Constitution, and it was the Constitution that specifically gave exclusive power to the United States Government, the national government, to deal with issues of foreign policy and especially international trade. What we have going on in this country, for example, Berkeley City Council added two more oil companies to its boycott list. The council will no longer buy gas from Shell and Chevron because it does business in Nigeria. Since Berkeley has already banned ARCO, Unocal, Mobil and Texaco for doing business in Burma and considered Exxon stained by the Valdez spill, the town is running out of options. So the issue is not WTO, but simply does the Federal Government or the State and local governments have jurisdiction over international trade policy? We cannot have an international trade policy promulgated by this Congress and then be preempted by 50 States and hundreds of local communities.”