Don Nickles: “As we wrap up this summer session prior to the August break, I want to make a few comments. Several of my colleagues…”

“As we wrap up this summer session prior to the August break, I want to make a few comments. Several of my colleagues have discussed different issues. First, let me state that I am very pleased that this Congress was successful in passing trade promotion authority and the Andean Trade Preferences Act. Both of those are vitally important and long overdue. The Andean Trade Preferences Act should have been passed by the end of last year. Unfortunately, the majority said it had to be packaged with trade promotion authority and with trade adjustment assistance. I have no objection to passing trade adjustment assistance; I think we should. We have always done it. I happen to agree with it. Unfortunately, the majority--in this case the Democrats--said, in addition to trade adjustment assistance, we want to put in new entitlements and expand trade adjustment assistance not only for individuals who might directly lose their job to imports, they also said indirectly. That is an expansion. They also said we want to include agricultural workers. You might have every agricultural worker in America who says they lost a job, that it was due to imports because we are in an international market and prices go down. Now they want Federal assistance.…”