Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the good gentleman for bringing this issue to light and for holding this Special Order, and, of course, my colleagues who are with me here today. All of us who are probably older than the age of 25 have watched, probably in every State in the Union, certainly in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, every little town that you drove through in the State that I am privileged to represent, every little town had some small business, or maybe two or three: a shoe factory, a dress factory. One of the little towns south of us had a cigar factory or two. Over the course of my adult lifetime, those little factories, those small employers in every single town have left. The reason they left is multiple, but one of them is because the trade deals that were signed by previous administrations encouraged them to leave. They encouraged our competitors to take them over, and we closed up shop. We lost those jobs. Our folks in America had to go find work elsewhere and get retraining elsewhere. It has been 25 years since NAFTA was enacted. Twenty-five years is a long time. Things were different 25 years ago. There wasn't e-commerce. We weren't all thinking about a globalized economy. Now these antiquated laws that we are living under are holding back our American economy. If we would just pass the USMCA--it is in the hands of the Speaker right now. If we would just pass it, 176,000 new jobs, $68 billion in growth to our economy.…”