Max Baucus: “As explained in the Finance Committee's report on the TPA measure, in a series of decisions involving trade remedy…”

“As explained in the Finance Committee's report on the TPA measure, in a series of decisions involving trade remedy measures, the WTO Appellate Body and lower dispute settlement panels have fabricated obligations which our negotiators never accepted and blatantly disregarded the discretion which the Uruguay Round negotiators intended national investigating authorities to retain. These WTO tribunals have violated their mandate not to increase or reduce the rights and obligations of WTO Members; have imposed their preferences and interpretations, and those of a biased WTO Secretariat, on the United States and on other WTO Members; and have issued decisions with no basis in the legal texts they supposedly were interpreting. The effect has been to upset the careful balance achieved in the Uruguay Round by adding new, and wholly unwarranted, constraints on the use of trade remedies. The no-weakening directive presents no impediment to the pursuit of a forceful U.S. agenda to address the problems plaguing WTO dispute settlement.”