Political Quotes

“Mr. President, yesterday the White House announced it will not submit three pending free-trade agreements, FTAs, with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama until Congress reaches a deal on reauthorizing the trade adjustment assistance for workers programs, the so-called TAA. I applaud President Obama for putting the workers first before we do these trade agreements. The trade agreements are very controversial, as they always are. The promises are always that they will create jobs, and they rarely do. They usually result in a decrease in jobs. Yet too often Congress jettisons the safety net to protect those workers who lose their jobs because of these agreements. That is why I applaud President Obama for making this one clear. He will not send these trade agreements to Congress until Congress has sent to his desk--not talked about it, not debated it, not passed one committee or one House, but sent to his desk--trade adjustment assistance expansion. As my colleagues know, since we let this program expire in February because of Republican objections, Senator Casey and I went to the floor day after day in December and then again in February as Republicans continued to object just to continuing trade adjustment assistance as we had begun in the Recovery Act 2 years earlier. So what happened? Because of these Republican objections, we shut out service workers and we shut out manufacturing workers who had lost their jobs to countries with which we do not have a free-trade agreement.…”