Mark Pocan: “I thank the gentleman from the 17th District of California for his words. As he mentioned, there are a number of…”

“I thank the gentleman from the 17th District of California for his words. As he mentioned, there are a number of provisions that you can start to drill down to. In the giant volumes that make up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, there are provisions that I think the American people have no idea about. In fact, I would argue there are some people in Congress who have no idea what is in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. {time} 1915 Just one of those provisions that Representative Honda mentioned is the investor-State dispute settlement process, the ISDS provisions, where you have a three-person tribunal of unelected, unaccountable people, people who are corporate lawyers one day and then fair arbitrators of the law another day, that set up this separate legal process from the American judicial system that international companies, multinational companies, can access if they want to sue a local government for a law that they have passed that they think affects their future profits. Think about it. Everyone else in the country has to follow the court system we have in the United States, but if a multinational company, because of the provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, decides that they want to go around that system and go to three corporate lawyers who form a tribunal under this ISDS provision and they want to challenge that law, they can sue for monetary damages. Think about it.…”