[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 18]
[Senate]
[Pages 26421-26425]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



         AFRICAN GROWTH AND OPPORTUNITY ACT--MOTION TO PROCEED

  Mr. LOTT. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to Calendar 
No. 215, H.R. 434, the trade bill.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
  Mr. LOTT. I now move to proceed to Calendar No. 215.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Madam President, the Senator from Iowa has been 
generous enough to let me speak a very short while on this measure, to 
tell you at the time we get on the bill the chairman of the Finance 
Committee, who cannot be here at this moment, will offer a manager's 
amendment which includes the sub-Saharan Africa bill which we are now 
technically on, with the Caribbean Basin Initiative bill, as well as 
the reauthorization of the Generalized System of Preferences and the 
Trade Adjustment Assistance programs. These measures have been reported 
by the Committee on Finance by an all but unanimous vote, voice vote, 
in all these cases. We very much hope we will bring this to a 
successful conclusion.
  At stake is two-thirds of a century of American trade policy going 
back to the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 for which there is 
a history. Cordell Hull began the policy, under President Roosevelt.
  In 1930, the Senate and the House passed what became known as the 
Smoot-Hawley tariff. If you were to make a short list of five events 
that led to the Second World War, that would be one of them. The 
tariffs went to unprecedented heights here. As predicted, imports 
dropped by two-thirds, but as was not predicted so did exports. What 
had been a market correction--more than that, the stock market collapse 
in 1929--moved into a long depression from which we never emerged until 
the Second World War.
  The British went off free trade to Commonwealth preferences, the 
Japanese began the Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere, and in 1933, 
with unemployment at 25 percent, Adolph Hitler came into power as 
Chancellor of Germany. That sort of misses our memory. In 1934, Cordell 
Hull, Secretary of State, began the Reciprocal Trade Agreements program 
which was designed to bring down, by bilateral negotiations, the levels 
of tariffs. This has continued through administration after 
administration without exception since that time.
  I would like to note in the bill we have before us that there are two 
measures of very large importance, both of which have expired. Unless 
we move now, we will again lose immeasurably important trade provisions 
for us.
  The first of these is the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which 
is now in its 37th year. I can stand here as one of the few persons--I 
suppose the only--who served in the administration of John F. Kennedy. 
I was an Assistant Secretary of Labor. President Kennedy had sent up a 
very ambitious bill, the Trade Expansion Act. It was really the only 
major legislation of his first term. It required, in order to meet the 
legitimate concerns of southern textile manufacturers and northern 
clothing unions--needle trades, let's say--that we get a long-term 
cotton textile agreement which Secretary Blumenthal, Secretary Hickman 
Price, Jr., and I negotiated in Geneva successfully. True to their 
word, the Southern Senators came right up to this measure and voted for 
it. But we added something special, which was trade adjustment 
assistance.
  We agreed in a free trading situation, or freer trade situation, the 
economy at large and the population at large would be better off, but 
some would lose. Trade adjustment assistance was to deal with that 
situation. It had been first proposed, oddly, by a fine labor leader, 
David MacDonald, of the United Steel Workers, in 1954, saying if we are 
going to have lower barriers to trade, we are going to lose some jobs; 
gain others. It was based on a modest and fair request from American 
labor: If some workers are to lose their jobs as a result of freer 
trade that benefits the country as a whole, a program should be 
established to help those workers find new employment.
  It was Luther Hodges, Secretary of Commerce under President Kennedy,

[[Page 26422]]

who came before the Finance Committee to propose this measure. 
Secretary Hodges was the Governor of North Carolina, was he not? A 
wonderful man; I recall working with him. I know the Senator from South 
Carolina would. He said to the Finance Committee that ``the Federal 
Government has a special responsibility in this case. When the 
Government has contributed to economic injuries, it should also 
contribute to the economic adjustments required to repair them.''
  This has been in law, and we added a special program for NAFTA, and 
for firms as well. It has been there for 37 years. The program has now 
expired. The continuing resolution keeps it going for 3 weeks or 
whatever, but if we lose this we lose a central feature of social 
legislation that has allowed us to become the world's greatest trading 
nation with the most extraordinary prosperity in the course of a 
generation.
  There is also the matter of the Generalized System of Preferences for 
the developing world. It was a response to a plea by developing 
countries that the industrial world ought to give them an opportunity 
and a bit of incentive to compete in world markets; not to beg for aid, 
just to buy and sell. It has been in our legislation since the Trade 
Act of 1974, which makes it a quarter century in place. It was renewed 
in 1984. It is now on life support. We got a 15-month extension in 
1993; a 10-month extension in 1994; 10 months in early 1996; 13 months 
in early 1997; 12 months in 1998.
  We have responsibility in both of these matters. The Finance 
Committee has met that responsibility. In due course, we will bring 
this measure to the floor for what we hope will be a successful vote on 
renewal of Trade Adjustment Assistance and a 5-year reauthorization of 
the Generalized System of Preferences.
  I do not want to keep the Senate any longer. I see my distinguished 
colleague is on the floor. I thank my friend from Iowa, and I yield the 
floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Madam President, it is an agreed fact among our 
colleagues in the Senate there is no member more steeped in history and 
erudite in its intellectual history than our distinguished senior 
Senator from New York, Mr. Moynihan. I agree with him absolutely with 
respect to Trade Adjustment Assistance and the Reciprocal Trade 
Agreements Act and a variety of initiatives made since that time.
  I have to oppose the motion because I am the one who objected, of 
course, to this so-called sub-Sahara/CBI bill.
  One, with respect to Smoot-Hawley, it did not cause the depression 
and World War II. I want to disabuse anybody's mind from that 
particular suggestion. The stock market crash occurred in October 1929, 
and Smoot-Hawley was not passed until 8 months later in June of 1930.
  At that particular time, slightly less than 1 percent of the GNP was 
in international trade. It is now up to 17 percent. At that time trade 
did not have that big an effect on the GNP or the economy of the United 
States itself. True, Germany, Europe, and everybody else was in a 
depression, and we entered the depression as a result of the crash.
  Along came Cordell Hull. I want to emphasize one concept: the 
Reciprocal Trade Act of 1934; reciprocity; not foreign aid but foreign 
trade; a thing of value for an exchange of value. We learned that in 
Contracts 101 as lawyers.
  Somehow over the past several years we have gotten into ``we have to 
do something.'' We are the most powerful Nation militarily and 
economically; perhaps not the richest. We do not have the largest per 
capita income. We are down to about No. 8 or 9. We are not the richest, 
but we are very affluent comparatively speaking.
  The urge is there, and I understand that urge to want to help, but we 
gave at the office. Let me tell you when I gave at the office, for my 
textile friends.
  We have been giving and giving and giving. We had a hearing before 
the International Trade Commission. It was the Eisenhower 
administration at that particular time. I came to testify as the 
Governor of South Carolina. The finding was in June of 1960. It was in 
early March of 1960. I was chased around the room by none other than 
Tom Dewey. He was a lawyer for the Japanese. They were not a concern at 
the particular time. Ten percent of textiles consumed in America was 
being imported, and if we went beyond the 10 percent, it was determined 
that it would devastate the economy, particularly the textile economy 
of the United States of America.
  I am looking around this room, and I can tell you that over two-
thirds--that is a 2-year-old figure; I bet it is up to 70 percent--but 
two-thirds of the clothing I am looking at, not 10 percent, is 
imported.
  When I say we gave at the office again and again--I can go to Desert 
Storm, and I will do that, and how we gave Turkey a couple of billion 
dollars in increased textile imports, how we bought this crowd off, and 
every time we have a crisis, whatever it is, we give to people who ask 
for our help.
  My point is, at that particular time, I left that hearing. I had a 
good Republican friend who knew President Eisenhower. We checked in 
with Jerry Parsons. I can still see him in the outer office. He said: 
The Chief can see you now. We went in and saw President Eisenhower and 
he was committed to helping the textile industry. But by June, it had 
gone the other way.
  As a young Democratic southern Governor, I said: I am going to try 
that fellow Kennedy. I had never been with him, but I came up in August 
and sat down with Mike Feldman. He is still alive and can verify this. 
He was legislative assistant to John F. Kennedy. I can show my 
colleagues the office in the old Russell Building. We sat down and 
agreed that I will write this letter as a Governor and Senator Kennedy 
will write back because being from Massachusetts, he understood the 
desperate nature of the textile economy at that time. We exchanged 
letters. I will have to get that letter because our revered leader of 
that particular administration was, of course, and is still revered 
now, the Senator from New York, Mr. Moynihan. He knows this more 
intimately than I, but I know this particular part of it.
  We sat down and agreed because there was a national security 
provision. Before the President could take executive action, there had 
to be a finding that a particular commodity was important to the 
national security of the United States of America. We got the Secretary 
of Labor Arthur Goldberg, Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges, 
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary McNamara of Defense, and Doug 
Dillon, Secretary of the Treasury. He was most interested. I sat down 
and talked with Secretary Dillon. He was fully briefed from my northern 
textile friends.
  Incidentally, the Northern Textile Association met last weekend down 
in my hometown with Karl Spilhaus. Bill Sullivan previously ran the 
organization.
  We brought in witnesses. We had hearings. And about April 26 they 
made a finding. Steel was the most important industry to our national 
economy and second most important to our national security was 
textiles. We could not send our soldiers to war in a Japanese uniform, 
and I used to add to that, and Gucci shoes.
  Eighty-six percent of the shoes in this Chamber today are imported. 
The shoe industry is practically gone. Textiles are about gone, and 
Washington is telling them: You have to get high-tech, high-tech, 
global economy, global competition, retrain--it sounds like Mao Tse-
tung running around reeducating the people, getting them skills.
  We are closing down our knitting mills, one in particular was the 
Oneida Mill. They made T-shirts. They had 487 employees. The average 
age was 47.
  Tomorrow morning, let's say we have done it Washington's way, we have 
reeducated and trained the 487 employees, and now they are skilled 
computer operators. Are you going to hire a 47-year-old computer 
operator or the 21-year-old computer operator? You are not going to 
take on those health costs; you are not going to take on those 
retirement costs.

[[Page 26423]]

  The little town of Andrew, SC, is high and dry, as are many other 
towns with so-called low unemployment, low inflation. Since NAFTA, 
South Carolina has lost 31,700 textile jobs. The reason I know that 
figure is because I talked with the Northern Textile Association last 
weekend. I am briefed on this particular subject.
  What we have in the CBI/sub-Sahara--the intent is good, to help--but 
we cannot afford any longer to give away these critical industries 
important to our national security.
  Specifically, I was with Akio Morita in Chicago in the early 
eighties. He was talking about the Third World developing and the 
developing countries. He said they must develop a strong manufacturing 
capacity in order to become a nation state.
  Later on he said ``And by the way, Senator, the world power that 
loses its manufacturing capacity will cease to be a world power.''
  Look at the back page of the U.S. News & World Report of last week, 
and the comments our friend Mort Zuckerman. You can see we are getting 
a divided society. We are losing those middle-class jobs. Henry Ford 
said: I want my workers to make enough to be able to buy what they are 
making. And our strong manufacturing economy has been drained 
overnight.
  I will bring a list of the particular items, including textiles where 
import penetration is high. So when you get and look at the CBI, and 
you look at the sub-Sahara, it is NAFTA without--and I don't think 
NAFTA worked at all--without the advantages of NAFTA; namely, the side 
agreements on the environment, the side agreements on labor, the 
reciprocity. There is no reciprocity. If we are going to let their 
products come in duty free, we should tell them to lower their tariffs.
  So this is a bad bill, to begin with. It should not have passed, 
almost unanimously, in that Finance Committee. They ought to look at 
these things more thoroughly. But the point is, we have to maintain 
these manufacturing jobs.
  I can remember when I was a child--and I know the distinguished 
Senator from New York would remember--the last call for breakfast, Don 
McNeil and ``Breakfast Club'' up there in Chicago.
  I feel like this is sort of the last call tonight for my textile 
friends. We will get into it more thoroughly because it isn't just the 
textile people. The truth is, I didn't carry Anderson, Greenville, and 
Spartanburg Counties, which have all the textile votes. They are going 
to be voting--you watch them--for George W. Bush. They have already 
made up their mind. They don't care about the campaign. We had them 
going Democratic only one time since Kennedy, and that was just 
momentarily for Jimmy Carter. We gave Barry Goldwater more votes, in 
the 1964 race, than he got in Arizona; percentage-wise and number-wise, 
both.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. No?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Oh, yes. Barry used to love to kid me about that. So I 
know from whence I am coming. It is just that it is terrible to see 
this thing happen all around you. And the new, jobs and all the so-
called new employment is going into retailing, and they are getting 
paid next to nothing. They will not even assume the health costs and 
everything else of that kind. So it is a real issue.
  And they always do this to me. They did NAFTA right at the end of the 
session. Then on GATT, I had to make them come back after the election. 
Now we have another 10 days, and they want to raise it. And I have to 
make the same motion not to proceed.
  I do appreciate the leadership and the brilliance of my leader, 
Senator Moynihan, of our Finance Committee. I thank him for his 
courtesy. But I am going to have to continue to object to moving to 
consider and proceeding on this particular measure.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Bravissimo.
  Mr. GRASSLEY addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. I thank the Chair.
  Madam President, it is my privilege, for a few moments, to take the 
place of our distinguished chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, 
who will be here shortly, and in my capacity as chairman of that 
committee's Subcommittee on International Trade, to speak for our side 
in support of this legislation.
  From the standpoint of speaking for our side, this is pretty much a 
bipartisan approach that will have overwhelming support. It is all the 
more a privilege to work for legislation that does have such broad 
bipartisan support.
  So, Madam President, I rise in support of the motion to proceed to 
H.R. 434. When we have the opportunity, we intend to offer a managers' 
amendment. And we would do that as a substitute for the House-passed 
language. That substitute will include the Senate Finance Committee's 
reported bills on Africa, an expansion of the Caribbean Basin 
Initiative, an extension of the Generalized System of Preferences, and 
the reauthorization of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act.
  I want to explain the intent behind these different Finance Committee 
bills that will be grouped together in the managers' amendment.
  Africa, as everyone knows, has undergone significant changes, as 
recently as the last decade. Many of those changes have been enormously 
positive: an end to apartheid in South Africa, a groundswell in support 
of democracy in a number of the sub-Saharan countries, and a new 
openness to using the power of free markets to drive economic growth, 
with the resultant raising of living standards.
  At the same time, there is no continent that has suffered more from 
the ravages of war, disease, hunger, and just simple want than Africa. 
The daily news has more often been filled with the images of violence 
and starvation than the small seeds of economic hope.
  The question before us is, How can our great country, the United 
States, help the transition that Africans themselves have begun?
  There are many problems we might try to address and an equal number 
of approaches to solving those problems. I am not going to argue that 
our managers' amendment we will offer is an entire panacea; nor is it 
equal to the tasks that our African partners have before them in the 
sense that if there is going to be real change there, it has to come 
from within.
  Instead, what our approach attempts to do is to take a small but very 
significant step towards opening markets to African trade. The intent 
is to encourage productive investment there as a means of building a 
market economy and doing it from the ground up.
  It is a means of giving Africans the opportunity to guide their own 
economic destiny rather than the economic policies of the past that 
attempted to dictate a particular model of development that was based 
upon so much government control of the economy.
  The strongest endorsement I can offer for moving this legislation 
comes from these African countries themselves. Every one of the sub-
Saharan African nations eligible for the benefits under this proposal 
has endorsed our efforts. There was a recent full-page advertisement in 
Roll Call that you may have seen recounting the number of U.S. 
organizations that support this initiative. They range from the NAACP 
to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the National Council 
of Churches.
  Our supporters include such notables as Coretta Scott King, Andrew 
Young, and Robert Johnson--the head of Black Entertainment Television 
who testified eloquently about the need to create new economic 
opportunities in Africa when he appeared before our Senate Finance 
Committee.
  The effort to move the bill also enjoys broad bipartisan support that 
I have already alluded to and complimented our colleagues on. It goes 
beyond bipartisanship in this body. It goes to the President himself 
because in his State of the Union Address, he identified this bill as 
one of his top foreign policy and trade priorities. The Finance 
Committee's ranking member, as you have already heard, Senator 
Moynihan, is a cosponsor and public supporter of the Africa bill, along 
with

[[Page 26424]]

being a tireless advocate of trade expansion in both word and deed over 
several decades.
  The distinguished minority leader was one of the first to recognize 
the need for a special focus on Africa in trade terms when he called 
for such a program as part of the Uruguay Round implementing 
legislation that passed this body 4 years ago. And, the very fact the 
majority leader has found time for us to debate this bill this late in 
this session, when there is so much pressure to address other issues, 
is indicative of our majority leader's support.
  So in summation, you can see strong bipartisan support exists for the 
managers' amendment, and that the managers' amendment will also include 
the Caribbean Basin Initiative.
  The approach adopted by the Finance Committee is consistent with the 
administration's own proposal. It is also broadly consistent with the 
proposal introduced by Senator Graham, who has also been a tireless 
advocate on behalf of the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the 
opportunity that that bill and that program provide for the beneficiary 
countries in the Caribbean and Central America.
  In substance, the managers' amendment on CBI adopts an approach 
similar to that afforded sub-Saharan Africa under the proposed bill. 
Indeed, both of those proposals build on the model established with the 
passage of the original CBI legislation, I believe, now, 15 or 16 years 
ago.
  In fact, it was 1983 that that bill was adopted. When it was adopted, 
the region was beset with economic problems and wrenched with civil 
strife. The goal of the original legislation was to encourage new 
economic opportunities and a path towards both political and economic 
renewal. It accomplished that by offering a unilateral grant of tariff 
preferences designed to encourage productive investment, economic 
growth, and the resultant higher standard of living.
  The original Caribbean Basin Initiative, which we made permanent in 
1990, recognized that economic hope was essential to peace and 
political stability throughout the region. However, since 1990 we have 
had the intervening negotiation of the North American Free Trade 
Agreement, and that undercut the preferences initially offered to the 
Caribbean and Central American beneficiaries of the Caribbean Basin 
Initiative.
  So the managers' amendment we will offer is an attempt to restore 
that margin of preference to the Caribbean producers and the economic 
opportunity the original CBI legislation was designed to create.
  It is also an attempt to respond to the hardships the region has 
faced due to natural disaster. That region, as we know, including both 
the Caribbean and Central America, has been hard hit in the past 2 
years by a series of hurricanes that in some instances devastated much 
of the existing economic infrastructure. No one can forget the pictures 
of devastation we saw of the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and 
Honduras following Hurricane Mitch--homes, farms, factories, we saw on 
television, literally washing away overnight, buried in clay.
  Members of the Finance Committee and many of our other colleagues had 
the opportunity to meet recently with the presidents of a number of 
Central American countries. Those presidents indicated that the single 
most important action we in the United States and our Government could 
take in their interest was not foreign assistance but economic 
opportunity to compete in a growing regional market.
  They saw this proposed legislation as a fulfillment of the promise 
extended by this Congress in that original legislation of 1983, the 
promise for a new economic relationship with the Caribbean and Central 
America. We must continue to fulfill that promise as, hopefully, our 
country keeps its promises, and not act as a charity but as a 
continuation of the leadership we have shown in our continent and our 
hemisphere, leadership that has put us on the cusp of the ultimate goal 
of the 21st century version of the Monroe Doctrine, a hemisphere of 
democratically elected governments, a hemisphere of free markets, and a 
hemisphere with rising standards of living.
  By moving this legislation forward, we will help these economies 
continue to grow and we will be investing in important markets that 
will become more integrated with our own, a market integration that 
benefits the United States as well.
  In light of that fact, it might be worth mentioning the importance of 
this legislation to one industry in particular, the textile industry, 
something the Senator from South Carolina has addressed but from a 
different point of view than I. When I say textile industry, I mean 
everyone from a farmer growing cotton to the yarn spinner, the fabric 
maker, the apparel manufacturer, producers of textile manufacturing 
equipment, as well as the wholesalers and retailers, everything from 
the farm to the consumer. The Africa bill and the Caribbean Basin 
Initiative bills are drafted to create a win-win situation for both our 
trading partners and for our own domestic industries.
  The managers' amendment we will offer takes a different approach than 
that of the House bill. Our bill is designed to create a partnership 
between America and industries, not to the benefit of one or the other, 
but to the benefit of both regions. Our proposal would accomplish that 
by affording preferential tariff and also preferential quota treatment 
to apparel made from American-made fabric, and it would be American-
made fabric in order to qualify.
  This does two things: First, it gives American firms an incentive to 
build a strong partnership with firms in both Africa and the Caribbean. 
Secondly, it helps establish a platform from which the American textile 
industry can compete in this global market.
  I want to refer to the industry's own analysis. That analysis shows 
that the approach adopted by our Senate Finance Committee offers real 
benefits to U.S. industry and to U.S. employment. It gives our industry 
a fighting chance in the years to come, as textile quotas are gradually 
eliminated pursuant to the World Trade Organization agreement on 
textiles.
  The reason I raise this point goes back to the efforts of our 
committee and our chairman to reestablish a bipartisan consensus on 
trade. In my view, the textile industry and all of its related parts 
will face significant economic adjustment as a result of the World 
Trade Organization textiles agreement. That adjustment has already 
begun to take place.
  What the industry found, however, based on its experience under 
NAFTA, is that partnering with Mexican firms or investing there for 
joint United States-Mexican production made our own United States firms 
very competitive. They discovered that United States firms became 
competitive even in the face of fierce competition they faced from 
textile industries in the developing world, and particularly the 
countries of China and India.
  The Finance Committee bills would broaden the base from which 
American firms could produce for the world market. In the context of 
the Uruguay Round, we made an implicit commitment to the textile 
industry to allow them a period of adjustment to a new economic 
reality. I am proud to support the proposed legislation and to make 
good on that promise by encouraging the industry to compete globally as 
well as locally.
  Through our managers' amendment, we intend to propose something that 
would take two other significant steps. The first is the renewal of the 
Generalized System of Preferences. We call that GSP for short. The GSP 
program has been on our statutes since 1975. GSP affords a grant of 
tariff preferences to developing countries generally, although not as 
extensive as those the proposal offers to Africa and to the Caribbean. 
GSP is generally described as a unilateral grant of preferences, and 
that is a very accurate description.
  What is little known is that the program has had more profound 
benefits for U.S. trade than is captured by that fairly significant 
description that doesn't describe the program so well.

[[Page 26425]]

  The original GSP program was instrumental in obtaining the commitment 
of continental powers like Great Britain to give up, finally, the 
highly discriminatory tariff systems they enforced in their economic 
relations with their former colonies. In other words, the creation of 
the GSP was instrumental in eliminating discriminatory trade barriers 
that distorted trade and thwarted our exporters' access to markets 
throughout the entire developing world.
  That beneficial program--GSP--has been around a while and 
accomplished a lot of good, but it has lapsed; it lapsed a few months 
ago, in June. So our managers' amendment would propose its renewal.
  The managers' amendment will also renew our Trade Adjustment 
Assistance programs. As my colleagues know, I am a strong supporter of 
free and fair trade. But I have, at the same time, consistently taken 
the view that those who benefit from expanding trade must look out for 
those who may be injured by the process of economic adjustment that 
trade brings.
  The Trade Adjustment Assistance programs are one part of that 
commitment. They offer assistance to both workers and firms that have 
faced a significant increase in import competition as they adjust to 
these new economic conditions. They have been on the books since the 
Trade Expansion Act of 1962. And the committee has made every effort to 
ensure that they are renewed to fulfill the bargain on trade policy 
originally struck with U.S. firms and U.S. workers over 30 years ago. 
So what we do with this reauthorization is keep our contract with these 
industries, and if trade unfairly affects them, we will be able to help 
them in a transition period. That is something we should do. It has 
worked well and we propose to continue it.
  There is, however, a real urgency to their renewal at this time. As I 
have said, they have lapsed and, unless they are renewed promptly, they 
will fall out of the budget baseline and will, in the future, need a 
revenue offset.
  In the context of the current debate over trade and trade policy, I 
view these programs as a minimum downpayment on reestablishing a 
bipartisan consensus on trade matters. And so I urge our colleagues to 
support the motion to proceed to the bill in order to renew these 
essential programs.
  Having discussed the intent behind each of the measures I intend to 
move as a part of the Senate substitute, I want to add one last point. 
We have before us in this legislation an opportunity to reestablish a 
strong measure of bipartisan support for what we in the Finance 
Committee view as an important trade and foreign policy initiative. So 
let us take this step and let us move forward in a way that will 
benefit Africa and the Caribbean--a way that will benefit much of the 
rest of the developing world--and a way that will serve our own 
national interests as well.
  And we propose this legislation with the U.S. national interest in 
mind, because we are cognizant of the fact that if we in the Congress 
do not look out for the interests of the American worker, we can't 
expect anybody else to do it. But when we can have the benefits of 
protecting our workers and creating jobs and expanding our economy and 
still help the rest of the world through these policies--and we have 
done that--we should continue to do that because, as President Kennedy 
said, ``Trade, not aid.''
  For an American populace that doesn't like foreign aid, I hope that 
they will join us in the Congress behind these bipartisan efforts to 
promote our national interests and strengthen our world leadership 
through these trade policies that help us, as well as helping these 
developing nations.
  I yield the floor.
  Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative assistant proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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