[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5004-5006]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

  Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, on Sunday, during a joint press 
conference in Hannover, Germany, with Chancellor Angela Merkel, the 
President of the United States said this:

       And with respect to Congress and the Trans-Pacific 
     Partnership--

  That is the big 5,000-page trade agreement the President is trying to 
move through Congress--


[[Page 5005]]

       I think after the primary season is over--

  After the primary season is over--

     the politics settle down a little bit in Congress, and we'll 
     be in a position to start moving forward. Because I know that 
     we had a majority of members in the past who were in favor of 
     this deal. Otherwise we wouldn't have gotten the authority 
     for me to go ahead and fast track the agreement. But I think 
     we all know that elections can sometimes make things a little 
     more challenging, and people take positions, in part, to 
     protect themselves from attacks during the course of election 
     seasons.

  I would suggest the American people should be very uneasy about their 
President making such a statement as that. We have already heard that 
there are plans by a number of forces and interest groups to try to 
slip this TPP through after the election in a lameduck congressional 
session.
  Why would that be the case? Well, the President says it right here: 
The American people are uneasy about it. They are not for this. Support 
for it is sinking. Elections are turning on it. And it does not need to 
become law.
  I am firmly opposed to this agreement. I believe it is bad for our 
country. It bothers me that if it is such a good deal, why don't they 
bring it forward? Why don't we have a debate here while elections are 
on? Why aren't people willing to go home and explain to their 
constituents how and why they voted the way they did and how and why 
they believe the way they do? What is wrong with that? Why wait until 
after, when things settle down a little bit, in the President's words, 
when people can't be held accountable by their constituents for the 
votes they cast or they think they may be able to slide away afterward?
  I don't like this. I don't think it is the right thing to do. I think 
it is arrogant. What the President is fundamentally saying and what a 
lot of these special interest groups are saying is, well, we know you 
in Congress are so smart, and we know the President is smart. But, the 
people out here, they don't understand how smart we all are, and we 
just need to get this done, and so we will have this trade agreement. 
But we understand you probably shouldn't do it right now while 
elections are going on because, well, you might get your clock cleaned. 
They might vote you out of office. So we will see if we can't work up a 
way to pass it sometime in the future.
  The President has made it clear that he intends to continue to push 
through this 5,544-page trade agreement that the American people don't 
want. Polls show consistent disapproval of the TPP. A March poll by 
Americans for Limited Government found that 51 percent of Americans did 
not know anything about it. I would say at least 50 percent of the 
Members of Congress don't know much about it. It is more than 5,000 
pages. I have probably spent more time on it than the vast majority 
have, and it is rather difficult to read. No wonder the American people 
say they don't know a lot about it. But of those who claim to be 
familiar with it, 58 percent oppose it. There are a lot of reasons for 
this, and we will talk about it more.
  Today, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman announced that they 
are beginning the 13th round of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment 
Partnership--TTIP, they call it--with the European Union in New York. 
So this is the second part of the fast-track. The fast-track guarantees 
a fast vote--without amendments, without the option to filibuster, on 
the floor of the Senate for less than 2 days, and you get an up-or-down 
vote. That is what fast-track does.
  So we will have the Pacific agreement probably coming up first, and 
then we will have the TTIP, the Atlantic agreement, and then there is a 
third one, the Trade in Services Agreement. All of these are huge trade 
agreements, unlike anything we have seen before, creating in the 
Pacific an international trade union similar to the beginning of the 
European Union that Britain is trying to get out of. I think we should 
be very dubious about that.
  How is the trade agreement faring in Europe? How about Germany, which 
is probably one of the leading trading countries in Europe? A poll by 
the Bertelsmann Foundation, a nonprofit organization that studies 
domestic and international politics, found that only 17 percent of 
Germans feel that TTIP--the transatlantic partnership--would be a good 
deal even though less than 2 years ago it had a 55-percent positive 
rating. This study found that the more people learn about the 
agreement, the more they oppose it. The same thing is happening in the 
United States, in my opinion.
  The President has referred to the TPP as the ``most progressive trade 
deal in history.'' Its chapters create new labor and environmental 
provisions that the public really knows nothing about.
  Even the economic data the White House promotes as proving the 
validity of the TPP, if we look at it carefully, we can see that their 
own report and study that they cite the most--that signing the 
agreement will decrease the rate of American manufacturing jobs by 
120,000. How is this good for America? By their own study, we are going 
to lose 120,000 manufacturing jobs that we would have maintained had we 
not signed the agreement. Another study by Tufts University said the 
country will lose 400,000 jobs. We are going to go into the differences 
in the studies, we are going to see the assumptions utilized in the 
model the President cites, and we are going to see that the assumptions 
they made are not reasonable. They are extreme assumptions--assumptions 
that would never occur in the next 15 years as they assume they will 
occur. No wonder they can justify positive numbers with those kinds of 
assumptions.
  I think all of us have to begin to reveal--and the American people 
need to be more alert--how bad this international agreement really is, 
how it will not positively affect the lives of most Americans. It is 
just not going to do so.
  We will look at how the Korean trade deal that I supported in 2011 
came nowhere close to being beneficial to the United States. In 2011, 
when President Obama signed the deal, the President said that it would 
increase American exports by $10 billion to South Korea. I thought that 
was a good thing. It sounded pretty good, but their estimates were way 
off.
  The model that experts used to study the Korean trade deal is the 
same one they are using to study the TPP, and so we have a pretty good 
test: Did we increase exports by $10 billion each year to South Korea, 
as the model suggested? Well, their imports to us increased by $12 
billion, and as of last year, we only increased our exports to Korea by 
less than a couple of hundred million dollars more than in 2011. So we 
didn't get any increase at all--virtually none. They had a huge 
increase to us, and our trade deficit with our allies and friends in 
South Korea increased 280 percent. This is a serious matter.
  The same thing happened: They used this same computer model when we 
signed the agreement with China in 2000. We then had a little less than 
$70 billion in trade deficit with China. They assumed our exports to 
China would grow at the same rate as China's exports to the United 
States would grow. Did that happen? No. What is the trade deficit with 
China today? Pushing $400 billion. Our trade deficit went up 6 percent 
again last year.
  So who is right here: The American people, who are worried about 
their jobs, their wages, their incomes, or the experts who promised all 
these grand things if we would just sign these agreements and everybody 
is going to be better off for it? I think the American people are the 
ones who have been proven right by this data.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have 1 
additional minute.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, the President does not need to be 
threatening our allies in Britain about the decision of their own 
people on whether to exit from the European Union. They are not happy 
with how things are going in the European Union. A lot of people are 
concerned

[[Page 5006]]

about it. It is heading toward a close vote. The people of the United 
Kingdom can make their own decision without hearing advice or threats 
from the President of the United States. I don't blame them for being 
offended by it. This is certainly not an acceptable position for the 
President to take.
  Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to share these remarks. 
I want to push back from the President's recent statements about this 
trade agreement, how he plans to move it through when people aren't 
watching. I also think Congress needs to speak and assert that we 
affirm the right of the people of the UK to decide whether to remain in 
the European Union.
  I thank the Chair.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.

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