Marshall Sanford: “Mr. Speaker, I was rated in the top five free traders in the 105th Congress; and yet, I reluctantly oppose PNTR for…”

“Mr. Speaker, I was rated in the top five free traders in the 105th Congress; and yet, I reluctantly oppose PNTR for China, for a couple of different reasons. First of all, we have a mechanical problem. And that is, if my colleagues look at WTO, it is a rule-based system. And yet, look at the dispute over hormone beef. Look at the dispute over bananas with EU. And what we see is another culture that has democratic governance, that has intellectual property rights, that has a rule of law, that has property rights, has basically said, we are just going to ignore the rules of WTO, we are going to ignore our agreement with America because we want to. And if we have that kind of disagreement within a culture that is very similar to our own, can my colleagues imagine the disagreement that we will find in a culture that is very different. In fact, history suggests that that inclination is right, because the 1998 USTR's Foreign Trade Barriers Report said that fully 400 of 1,200, one-third, of all products that were in the 1992 agreement between China and America were still subject to nontariff barriers. So what we are doing here is we are dropping a 400-pound gorilla in the swimming pool, and it will have implications for WTO itself. Also, we have a problem in that any time with the Cox report that we have a country engaged in espionage to steal our nuclear secrets, I do not know that that deserves award.”