Political Quotes

“I support granting the President Trade Promotion Authority, but I oppose the bill we are considering today. I have supported fast track authority for NAFTA, for GATT, I supported PNTR, but I oppose this bill. The reason I oppose it is that the landscape for trade legislation has changed, yet our delegation of authority to our President has not. Let me just cite one example. We talk about putting in our authority that we expect to make progress on labor standards by enforcing one's own laws. Yet when we accomplished that for Jordan, the first thing we did was to weaken our ability to enforce those standards. Let us take a look at antidumping laws. We passed legislation in this body that said we would not weaken our antidumping and countervailing duty laws. Yet in Doha we put that on the table for negotiations. So at least we would think that this underlying bill would make a principal objective of trade that we do not weaken our own laws in this regard. But, no, we put it as a third priority. What message is that to our trading partners? We can do better. Support the motion to recommit with the Rangel bill, then we really will give the right authority to the President. I urge rejecting the underlying bill and supporting the motion to recommit.”