Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I echo the words of Senator Sessions, my colleague from Alabama. These free-trade deals are not free trade. If they were free trade, they would be a couple of pages long that simply listed the tariffs that we are eliminating as incentives. Instead, these are a collection of special interest deals that take us somewhere else from where the proponents said they would. Senator Sessions said something interesting: This is really about jobs. They would be making claims about jobs. Instead, they make claims about geopolitics in China and all of that. That is fine, but there are certainly other ways to deal with that better than we have. We have seen big promises. We saw them from the first President Bush as he negotiated NAFTA. We saw them from President Clinton when he pushed NAFTA through Congress. We saw them from President Clinton on PNTR with China, which was not a trade deal but certainly acted like one in many ways in terms of what happened with China then. We saw them with the second President Bush with the Central America Free Trade Agreement. And we are seeing them now with President Obama and South Korea. On South Korea, President Obama's administration promised an increase of 70,000 jobs and promised wages would go up. They always say more jobs, higher wages, but then we ended up losing 75,000 jobs under the South Korea Free Trade Agreement. Today we are voting on whether to end debate on the fast-track bill.…”