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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, soon, we will be voting on the nomination of Jamieson Greer of Maryland to be U.S. Trade Representative.

I will be supporting that nomination. I voted for his nomination to get out of the Finance Committee because I believe we need a clear change from the last 4 years, when there was never any attempt to do anything to reduce trade barriers.

Unlike his predecessor, I am confident that Mr. Greer will pursue an aggressive trade strategy that includes opening access to new markets through new trade deals. I also believe that Mr. Greer will work to level the playing field for U.S. farmers to compete with Brazil fairly and to deal with China head on. As my colleagues know, I am a free and fair trader, and though I would not like to see extreme tariffs, I am hopeful that Mr. Greer and President Trump will bring us to freer and more fair trade.

We often think of Europe, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, and China as being big problems for us when it comes to trade. I would like to remind my colleagues that there are about 190 other countries on this globe that we can seek agreements with, and taking time to seek those agreements would be good.

Along this line, Senator Boozman, chairman of the Ag Committee, and I, a member of the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over trade, sent letters to members of the Finance Committee, the Agriculture Committee, and the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives. We asked our colleagues to listen to somebody who has had some experience in dealing with some of these smaller nations with bilateral trade agreements. That person is a person by the name of Al Johnson.

During the George W. Bush Presidency, he negotiated trade agreements with about a dozen countries that added up to about six or seven different agreements--all bilateral. I think, this is the way President Trump prefers--bilateral negotiations rather than multilateral negotiations. He was very successful, and that success can be measured by the fact that he has shown in his studies that, with these dozen countries with which we negotiated bilateral free-trade agreements during the George W. Bush administration, we increased our trade with those nations by about 600 percent.

So I hope my colleagues will give Al Johnson a chance to talk to them. I know he has already visited with some Members of the U.S. Senate, and he is very vigorously promoting the idea that we ought to have bilateral negotiations--and with a lot of countries that we never think about--that could be beneficial to American exports.

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