Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I appreciate Senator Thune's comments about the USMCA. Some might call it NAFTA 1.6. It just doesn't do very much. I was not in this body when NAFTA passed. I was down the hall in the House of Representatives. I voted against it. I saw what NAFTA did to my State and what it did to our country in the number of lost manufacturing jobs. States in the industrial Midwest still have not recovered from that legislation, from that trade agreement--the North American Free Trade Agreement. During the Clinton administration, I opposed the President of my own party on this. In the Bush administration, the other party pushed the one for Central America. There was one after another after another of these trade agreements, and we see the lost jobs. President Trump made a huge campaign promise that he was going to do something about it, and this agreement simply doesn't do it. We have talked to the U.S. Trade Representative repeatedly about enforcing labor standards. The whole point of fixing this agreement is so that companies will not shut down in Mansfield, in Zanesville, and in Lima, OH, and move to Mexico to build plants there and sell the products back to the United States. Yet do you know what is happening? Even the USMCA has no language in it that is going to stop the outsourcing of jobs.…”