Political Quotes

“Madam President, I am pleased to have been one of the conferees to H.R. 644, the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015. There are many important provisions in this legislation, some of which I helped to draft. There is one such provision that I particularly want to highlight. Honey producers in my State of South Dakota as well as producers of honey, crawfish, garlic, and mushrooms around the country, have suffered for 15 years because of unfair dumping from China. Senator Wyden and I have worked together for 5 years to ensure that the trade laws were enforced in these cases. Unfortunately, the latest struggles have been more with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, CBP, than with Chinese dumpers. Duties collected on dumped imports and all interest on those duties from 2000 and 2007 were to be paid to the injured domestic producers to allow them to reinvest and rebuild. For reasons that defy simple explanation, CBP ignored the direction of the statute to pay all interest to producers and instead deducted some types of interest from payments to producers. In effect, this practice amounted to forcing South Dakota honey producers to pay for the delays caused by Chinese dumpers, the U.S. insurance companies that posted bond for the duties, and in some cases of CBP itself. This practice defies the plain language of the statute and cost domestic producers tens of millions of dollars over the years.…”