[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 5 (Thursday, January 9, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S116-S118]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, in the fall of 2016, just 4 years ago, I 
heard Candidate Trump repeatedly promise to get rid of the North 
American Free Trade Agreement--to pull out of it, to renegotiate it, or 
to fix it so that it worked better than it did.
  I didn't support Donald Trump for President. I think he has been a 
less than honest President with whom I disagree in terms of his 
character and in terms of his work product, but that is really not the 
point. The point was

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that I liked what he said about getting out of NAFTA. I know what NAFTA 
did to the Presiding Officer's home State of Indiana. I know what it 
did to Dayton, OH; to Cleveland, OH; to Canton, OH; to Youngstown, 
Toledo, Mansfield, Springfield, Zanesville, and to almost every 
community in my State. So I welcomed the President's saying that.
  The reason I thought these trade agreements were so bad for our 
country was that these trade agreements were always written by 
corporate interests to serve the needs of the executives and the major 
stockholders of the corporations. In fact, they not only were not 
written for workers, but they undermined workers. I have never voted 
for a trade agreement. I voted against NAFTA, and I voted against the 
Central American Free Trade Agreement. I voted against permanent normal 
trade relations with China--one after another after another--because I 
saw that these trade agreements were written for corporate interests 
and that they betrayed workers.
  What happened is that companies would shut down production in Canton 
or in Niles or in Bryan or in Lima, and they would move overseas, build 
factories there, and sell those products back into the United States. 
That was what happened with these trade agreements. Corporations liked 
them because they could exploit low-income workers. They liked them 
because their profits could be greater. They liked them because they 
had no responsibility to their workers when they would move overseas 
and sell the products back. That was their mission. That was the way 
these companies did business. So I welcomed the President's doing that.
  Then, about a year ago, the President presented the new NAFTA. He 
called it the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the USMCA. When he 
presented it to the Congress, it was more of the same. It was almost 
exactly the same. It had a few little tweaks, but fundamentally the 
President again betrayed the workers, as all of these trade agreements 
do. The President's bill, the President's USMCA, was again a giveaway 
to corporate interests. In fact, there was a provision in there for the 
drug companies that was maybe worse than I had ever seen in a trade 
agreement. The White House, I admit, does look like an executive 
retreat for drug company executives except on Tuesdays and Fridays, 
when it looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives.
  The President presented this USMCA to us, and it was the same ol, 
same ol. It fundamentally would mean more jobs would be outsourced, 
more profits for corporations, and more exploitation of low-wage 
workers. Because of his USMCA, even more companies would shut down in 
Lima or in Zanesville or in Gallipolis or in Portsmouth or in 
Chillicothe and move overseas to look for cheap labor and weaker labor 
laws so they would make more money. So this President betrayed workers 
again by giving us a trade agreement that was no better than the ones 
he had campaigned against.
  Yet, this year, a number of us--Senator Wyden of Oregon, Speaker 
Pelosi, Congresswoman DeLauro of Connecticut, and organized labor--
banded together and said: No, Mr. President. We are not going to pass 
another corporate trade agreement. We are not going to pass another 
special interest trade agreement that sells out workers and enriches 
corporate executives over and over. We are not going to buy that again. 
We are saying no to that. Then we said: We will support your USMCA only 
if you include strong language for workers.
  So we got the Brown-Wyden amendment in this agreement.
  Finally, after a year--the President fundamentally refused to talk to 
us about it, and the U.S. Trade Rep refused to seriously include this 
language--they realized: Wait a second. If we don't do this, we will 
never get another USMCA. So just a few weeks ago, President Trump and 
U.S. Trade Representative Lighthizer finally agreed to put in strong 
labor language.
  Do you know what that means? It means that the center of our trade 
agreement now--the center of our trade policy--is workers. Workers are 
now at the center of our trade policy, not corporate interests that 
send jobs overseas, not pharmaceutical companies that make even more 
money when they go to China, not other kinds of corporations that 
outsource their jobs and have their whole business plans undermining 
workers.
  Do you know what else that means? It is good news for places like 
Gallipolis and Zanesville and Mansfield and Lima and Chillicothe and 
Columbus and Dayton and all of these communities in my State. It is 
good news for them because, for the first time, they can look to our 
trade policy and see that workers are the center of that trade policy.
  In years and years here, I have never voted for a trade agreement. I 
have always opposed NAFTA and CAFTA and PRT with China. Last week, in 
the Committee on Finance, because they included Brown-Wyden, because 
workers are now at the center of our trade policy, I cast my vote for a 
trade agreement that will matter, that will help workers in my State. 
It is a good move. It means not just that this trade agreement will be 
better; it means, in the future, that any President who wants to pass a 
trade agreement will have to do what we did this year over the 
resistance of President Trump. He will have to do what we did this year 
and put workers at the center of our trade policy.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, if I go back 2\1/2\ years, there was a 
lot of turmoil and a lot of conversation about the President of the 
United States' stepping into the issue of trade, specifically in North 
America, for it was a settled issue between Canada and Mexico. Yet we 
asked the question: Should we revisit NAFTA?
  At that time, a lot of people said that the trade agreement was 
complicated and hard and that we shouldn't touch the trade agreement, 
that we should just leave it alone. With all of its warts and all of 
its faults, it is what it is. Don't touch it.
  Instead, the President chose to step into the North American Free 
Trade Agreement and say: No. We are going to renegotiate this deal. It 
is 25 years old, and it needs a revisit. Against the many people who 
were pushing against him, he pushed through that and said: Let's start 
all over again.
  In the past 2\1/2\ years, the Trump team has renegotiated the deal 
and brought it back to Congress, where it passed with overwhelming 
bipartisan support--finally--in the House. It sat on the House's desk 
for 14 months before those in the House took it up. Finally, after 14 
months of their not taking it up, they passed it with overwhelming 
bipartisan support. It has now gone through the Committee on Finance 
here in the Senate with a vote of 25 to 3, and it is headed toward the 
floor of the Senate, to the President's desk, and finally to getting 
this issue resolved about North American free trade.
  Now, with this issue between Canada and Mexico, I have had some folks 
ask me: Why is it such a big issue? It is a big issue because Canada 
and Mexico are our No. 1 and No. 2 trading partners in the world. Far 
and away, Canada and Mexico are our biggest trading partners. Our trade 
relationships are essential not just to every border State but to 
States like my State. In Oklahoma, Canada and Mexico are also our 
biggest trading partners. They are vital to our economic success and 
have been key to what has happened in NAFTA over the last 25 years.
  Yet now, after all of the negotiations and all of the noise, we 
finally have a revised area in trade that has needed to be addressed 
with things like intellectual property, which is a new chapter in what 
is now called the USMCA or what people call NAFTA 2.0. This simple 
change is not so simple when trying to deal with intellectual property 
theft, whether it be a camcorder recording in a movie theater somewhere 
in Mexico, whether they sell pirated copies, which has been an issue, 
or whether it is just the ownership of patents and how things actually 
move from place to place. Can you confiscate property that is illegally 
produced at each border crossing, and how is that managed? That is 
addressed for the first time in this agreement--trying to protect 
American patent owners from not having their patents stolen once they 
leave and go to Canada or Mexico.
  Twenty-five years ago, digital trade was not a major issue in NAFTA. 
Obviously, it is a very significant issue for

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us now, and it is finally addressed in this agreement, as well as how 
we are going to handle digital services and digital trade.
  There is something very important to my State, and that is 
agricultural trade and how agricultural goods are going to move. Now, 
the vast majority of this USMCA agreement lines up exactly with the 
NAFTA of the past, but there are some areas that were problems in the 
NAFTA of the past that had to be addressed, one of those being wheat, 
for instance.
  When wheat moved from the United States into Canada, Canada 
downgraded that wheat to a lower grade so that our Oklahoma farmers 
would get less profit for that because they downgraded that wheat as it 
moved across the Canadian border. This agreement settles that issue. 
That was just Canadian protectionism. It wasn't that the wheat was of a 
lesser quality; it was just that they were trying to protect Canadian 
wheat instead of having an actual free market.
  This is a free trade area. The tariffs and the fees go away across 
North America if we can have a level playing field. In areas in which 
we don't have a level playing field, like with Oklahoma wheat competing 
with Canada's wheat, we are taking that on. I feel confident that 
Oklahoma wheat is going to win that fight, and given this new trade 
agreement, we get the opportunity to win that.
  There are lots of areas in the agreement that help us in agriculture. 
There are areas in digital trade and intellectual property, as well as 
in multiple other areas of manufacturing. That is why so many groups 
and so many individuals have looked at this and have gone back to the 
Trump administration, with some of my Democratic colleagues 
begrudgingly swallowing hard and saying: This is a good agreement for 
America in the future. This does help us keep jobs here. This helps us 
continue to have a level playing field for trade.
  I congratulate the Trump administration for its 2\1/2\ long years of 
very hard work to get to this agreement. I am grateful that we are 
nearing an agreement with China, a phase No. 1 agreement. It is much 
needed because China has been a major problem in intellectual property 
theft and in its having an unfair trading platform. I am grateful the 
administration has also completed the first stage of a major, new trade 
agreement with Japan. Those are our four largest trading partners, and 
it is significant to our economy not just in the short term but in the 
long term that we continue to have stable free trade areas in as many 
places as we can.
  I am confident in the American worker. When given the opportunity to 
compete, we win because of the quality of our work, the quantity of our 
work, and the creativity of the inventions we put out from this 
country. Let's keep doing that. Let's keep winning around the world in 
our trade agreements.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.