Joe Cunningham: “unlike the last speaker that voted against NAFTA and GATT, I voted for them because I believed that they had a lot of…”

“unlike the last speaker that voted against NAFTA and GATT, I voted for them because I believed that they had a lot of interest and that if this country does not get involved in trade in the future, I think we are going to be in big trouble. But I think that under both Republican and Democrat administrations, that the week link in our trading policy has been our State Department. I do not believe that either Republican or Democrat State Departments have had the spine to enforce the policies with our trading nations. A very famous gentleman once said that we need to walk softly and carry a big stick, but our policy in the past is to walk softly and give our trading partner the stick. In every case, whether it is an Ak- 47 or a Stinger missile or 300,000 machine guns that are silenced being sold to our inner cities, and I ask my colleagues on the other side, the things that we have fought against, assault weapons, here is a country that is dumping assault weapons and Stinger missiles into our country, into our inner cities.”