[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 17649]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       STRONGLY SUPPORTING CAFTA

  (Mrs. JOHNSON of Connecticut asked and was given permission to 
address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Mrs. JOHNSON of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of 
the CAFTA agreement. Goods come from CAFTA countries into America 
absolutely duty free. Whether they are industrial, whether they are 
agricultural, no matter what goods they are, they come in duty free.
  Our goods, when they go to their markets, suffer from the weight of 
heavy duties. So all this agreement does is drop the duties on our 
goods, drop the tariffs on American goods flowing into these markets.
  It is a win for America on every single front. It is the status quo 
for the Central American nations. Why would they agree to it? Because 
it makes it permanent and because there are some two-way partnerships 
in this bill that are an advantage to these Central American nations, 
and to us.
  We will be defeated by China in textiles if we do not modernize the 
partnership between the American yarn makers and the Central American 
textile companies.
  As to the labor agreements, the labor portions of this agreement, I 
have gone into those in great detail over and over again. We have the 
best labor agreements we have ever had in any Free Trade Agreement, and 
the Democrats in this House have voted for those agreements 
overwhelmingly. It is a double standard, it is artificial, and it is 
unfair to vote against this agreement.

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