[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 147 (Tuesday, October 28, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H9563]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            NAFTA EXPANSION PULLED FROM SUSPENSION CALENDAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore [Mr. Packard]. Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 21, 1997, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Brown] is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, Speaker Gingrich has tried it again. 
Earlier this year, the Speaker attempted to insert the Caribbean Basin 
initiative into the budget bill. The Caribbean Basin initiative would 
have expanded NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed 4 
years ago, would have expanded NAFTA to 26 Caribbean and Central 
American nations all buried in a budget bill that no one really would 
have understood or seen. Today Speaker Gingrich was trying it one more 
time. H.R. 2644, the United States-Caribbean trade partnership, again 
basically the same issue, there was an attempt today to put it on the 
Suspension Calendar and ram it through Congress with no amendments, 
with not very much discussion and put together with a whole lot of 
other issues and a whole lot of other pieces of legislation. 
Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of people on both sides of the aisle 
that do not think we should expand NAFTA with only 20 or 30 minutes of 
debate, we should expand NAFTA to 26 more Caribbean and Central 
American nations, fortunately because there is so little support for 
that in this body, even though the support comes from the Republican 
leadership, that initiative was pulled off the calendar today.
  That means that this Congress will in fact have an opportunity to 
debate the Caribbean Basin initiative at some point, and I believe that 
Congress ultimately will defeat it because there simply is not the 
support in this body for expanding NAFTA for those kinds of trade 
agreements.
  That clearly speaks to the next step. The next step is within the 
next 2 weeks, Congress will likely vote on giving the President the 
authority, the fast track authority to negotiate other trade agreements 
with Latin American countries. There clearly is not a majority of 
Members' support in this Congress to give the President fast track 
authority to expand NAFTA. It is pretty clear that this body should 
think twice before we rush headlong into a series of trade agreements 
that cost us American jobs, in trade agreements that jeopardize 
American food safety, in trade agreements that question the viability 
of truck safety on America's highways, that we should think twice 
before rushing into another series of trade agreements that jeopardize 
health and safety and jobs in this country before we fix the North 
American Free Trade Agreement.
  The North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in 1993 in this 
country, has already cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs. The 
North American Free Trade Agreement has jeopardized American food 
safety, stories of strawberries that have infected Michigan 
schoolchildren with hepatitis A, strawberries coming from Mexico, 
raspberries coming from Guatemala, all kinds of food products coming 
into this country, not well enough inspected at the Mexican border; 
food products grown under conditions not acceptable in this country, 
where pesticides that are banned in the United States in many cases are 
actually legal in Mexico and Central America and other Latin American 
countries, where the North American Free Trade Agreement, and if 
expanded by the President's and Speaker Gingrich's request, expanding 
those trade agreements to other countries in Latin America clearly will 
mean more problems at the border, more problems with food safety, more 
contaminated food in our country's food supply and our country's 
grocery stores, more problems with truck safety as trucks come across 
to the tune of thousands of trucks a day across the border now confined 
only to New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California, but as those trucks 
move into the other 44 States of the mainland, we clearly will have 
even more problems with truck safety.
  That is why, Mr. Speaker, we should defeat fast track, not rush 
headlong into an agreement, into a new series of agreements that costs 
American jobs, jeopardizes American food safety and truck safety. We 
should defeat fast track today. I applaud the Speaker for pulling off 
the calendar the Caribbean Basin initiative. It was a bad idea. Fast 
track is a bad idea. We should defeat both those agreements when they 
come to the floor of the House of Representatives.

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