Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from Kansas, who has just made the case eloquently as to why we need to move forward. To answer his question, when you apply the metrics the President of the United States and his administration have used for these three trade agreements alone, they would create 250,000 new jobs. I ask my colleagues, with 9 percent unemployment and continued bad economic news, can't we use those jobs? By the way, jobs that are related to trade tend to be higher paying, tend to have more benefits. This is exactly what we need to do in this Senate and in the House and here in Washington--put the partisanship aside and move forward on what makes sense to create jobs. I can't think of anything that would have a more immediate impact on those exporters Senator Roberts talked about, who right now are seeing their market share eroded because the United States is sitting on its hands. In 2006, the Colombia agreement was finalized. It has been tinkered with since then, but we are talking 5 years ago. It is unbelievable. When we have sat on our hands and not moved forward with giving our farmers and our workers and our service providers the chance to go into that Colombian market, you are exactly right, they have gone ahead and made trade agreements with other folks. Colombia is a great example. Back when we negotiated this agreement and completed it--and I was the U.S.…”