[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Page 2879]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       TRADE PROMOTION AUTHORITY

  Mr. ISAKSON. Madam President, I rise for a minute to talk about trade 
between the United States and our trading partners around the world.
  To make the point of my remarks, I ask rhetorically for everybody in 
the auditorium and the Senate Chamber to answer these questions:
  Are you willing to cut American sales of goods and services by over 
$2 trillion?
  I think the answer would be a resounding no.
  Secondly, are you ready to diminish or lose 39.8 million jobs?
  Nobody in here wants to give up $2.3 trillion in American business, 
and everybody wants more jobs in the middle class, and nobody wants to 
cost America 39 million jobs. But that is exactly what is going to 
happen if we don't pass TPA, if we don't enter into trade agreements 
and aggressively work to make the three pending trade agreements the 
United States has workable for our country.
  Yesterday I listened as Members of this body came to the floor to 
talk against trade and talk against the trade promotion authority. For 
the benefit of our new Members, trade promotion authority is our 
authorization to give the President the parameters, the limitations, 
and the prerogative to negotiate trade agreements, which come back to 
us for a final ratification up or down. That is a good way to do 
business. The world recognizes that if our President has trade 
promotion authority, he can sit down across the table from them and he 
can make a deal, and it is only subject to one vote of the U.S. Senate. 
If we leave it as it is now, where there is no trade promotion 
authority, then we can vote on every amendment, every prerogative, 
every limitation, every opportunity, and make negotiations for the 
administration and our country impossible.
  We have three pending agreements before the United States of America: 
first, the trade promotion authority for the President; second, the 
African Growth and Opportunity Act, which expires in September of this 
year; next is the trade and investment partnership with Europe; and 
lastly is the transpacific trade agreement with the Pacific Rim. All 
three of those agreements are important for us to negotiate and close 
the deal on. Yet, without passing TPA, we can do none.
  Ambassador Froman and the administration are doing an outstanding job 
of representing the United States. I have traveled with him to the 
African Union in Africa to work on the goal. I was with him yesterday 
afternoon. I talked with him about some of the obstacles we have in 
terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and I have talked to him about 
the transatlantic trade and promotion act--all of which we need to pass 
and all of which he needs to be able to negotiate. But without TPA, the 
United States of America is sitting at the table but they can't make a 
deal, and the President doesn't have the authority that he needs and 
that he says he wants.
  Most of the opposition I have heard on the floor of the Senate comes 
from the people in the President's own party. In the last two State of 
the Union Addresses, the President of the United States has underlined 
the importance of TPA. He said it again this year. But yesterday seven 
Members of his party came to the floor to talk against trade promotion 
authority.
  It is time for us to sit around the table and talk about $2.3 
trillion in business for our country and 39.8 million jobs in our 
country. Let's talk about how we can increase those jobs. In my State 
of Georgia, 1.2 million jobs are directly export-related. The Congress 
of the United States appropriated $706 million over the next 6 years 
for the deepening and expansion of the Savannah Harbor in Savannah, GA. 
The Panama Canal is being widened and next year will open to the ships 
of the 21st century. Are they going to go somewhere else if we don't do 
trade promotion authority? Probably so. We all saw what happened last 
week when the west coast shut down because of the longshoremen's strike 
and what an impact it had on our economy. That is the kind of impact we 
are going to have if we don't do trade promotion authority for the 
President.
  It is ironic that almost unanimously the Republican Members of the 
Senate are for trade promotion authority, and it appears, after 
yesterday's speeches, that a significant majority of the Democratic 
Party is against it. Yet their President is for it.
  All of us are for jobs. All of us are for business. All of us are for 
economic activity. It is time we put our differences aside and 
delineate for the President of the United States the negotiating 
parameters, the negotiating authority, and the ability we grant to him 
to make deals in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic 
Trade and Investment Partnership and the African Growth and Opportunity 
Act. All three will mean jobs not just for my State of Georgia but for 
our country. All three will be good for our national defense and our 
security. People don't tend to fight with or bomb people with whom they 
do business. The more trade agreements we have, the more business we 
share, the more exchanges of our currency and economic prosperity, the 
better off our country is, the better off our security is, and the 
better off are jobs for those in the middle class.
  I thank the Presiding Officer for the opportunity to speak from the 
floor, and I encourage all my Members in the Senate, Republican and 
Democrat alike, to dedicate themselves when we come back to 
expeditiously bringing up trade promotion authority, delineating our 
differences, negotiating those differences, and giving our President 
the opportunity to create more jobs for America, more jobs for Georgia, 
more jobs for West Virginia, and more jobs for our country.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.

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