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Floor Speech

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Mr. MORENO. I find it interesting that we are having this conversation again because since the last time we spoke--and I want to remind my colleague from Massachusetts that I praised him heavily the last time for his position on voting against the United States-China normalization act when he was in Congress 25 years ago because I believe that that bill is what set America on a very dark path toward deindustrialization. Had his colleagues listened to him, we would be in a different place.

But I thought what I would do today is read some comments from some of my constituents in Ohio because there are a lot of opinions here. So let's see. What do real business owners who deal with this situation think about every day?

Let me start with Dr. Nick Jarmoszuk. He is the CEO of a company in Lorain, OH, called Skylift.

I asked him: Hey, Doc, what do you think about tariffs? How is it affecting your business in Lorain, OH?

To remind my colleagues, Lorain, OH, is a lot like, maybe, some of the areas of South Boston. These were once great, thriving, working- class communities that have been gutted.

He was happy to respond, and he said: America's trade imbalance with the rest of the world is something that has been festering for a long time. It is a good thing to address. The longer you leave it, the tougher it is to fix.

He said he would not be hurt by the severe 145-percent tariff on China. It was then at that level. Now, as everybody knows, it is at 30 percent because the company uses components that are manufactured in the United States. If most people did that, we would be in a better place, he said. The complaints you get are from Wall Street, which wants instant gratification. We don't.

I thought that was a good comment.

Here is Belinda Durham, also from Lorain, OH. She is a used car dealer.

She says: The companies that produce in foreign countries should have to pay for taking jobs away from the United States. I think this stuff should be made here.

Kent Savage, the CEO of Velocity Concept Development Group, an engineering and manufacturing company in Cambridge, OH: What will come out of the trade war is something more equitable than the system we had before Liberation Day. There wasn't just a level playing field before.

Jack Schron is an amazing entrepreneur in Cleveland, OH. He is the president of a company called Jergens, Inc., not to be confused with the lotion. It is a tool manufacturer: Trump's tariffs have disrupted global trade and the American economy. Yet those same new rules are making these manufacturing goods more price-competitive with imports for the first time in many years. We are swamped. We are running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in both Chicago and Cleveland, said Jack Schron, which makes manufacturing tools, including industrial screwdrivers, clamps, and hoists.

Schron says that his factories in Ohio and in Illinois are going gangbusters, partly owing to the new orders from customers who are looking to avoid paying import tariffs and partly because of increased demand over the last 18 months from the defense industry.

Let me just tell the Presiding Officer a little bit about Jergens because he may not know about this company.

It is right in the city core of Cleveland. I was there about 2 weeks ago at a facility right near it called MAGNET. It is a tech incubator in Cleveland, OH. These people who go to MAGNET, to the core site, whom I saw who end up going to work at Jergens, were formerly incarcerated citizens or were people who, if not for the opportunity to go work at Jergens, would have no other ability to get a good, family-sustaining wage job.

Let me just repeat what Jack Schron said: Business is going gangbusters.

I am perplexed why my colleague, who 25 years ago was on the right side of this issue, is saying we have to block deindustrialization and that we have to make things here in America. That actually is a comment that would have been made in this Chamber in the late 1950s, early 1960s by one of your great Democratic colleagues. I think that person, today, would be a member of the Republican Party of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who believed in the power of advocating for the working class.

Let me just say one other quote here. Donny Chaplin, president of Grand River Rubber & Plastics in Ashtabula, OH--snow country. This is a place where, if it doesn't snow 24 inches on a Monday, it is considered a bad day. Donny said that he has seen a rush--a rush--of new inquiries and orders. Two previous customers who had switched to Chinese suppliers a few years ago came back in recent days wanting to buy rubber gaskets from Grand River again or for the plastic pail gaskets they manufacture.

Three manufacturers of oil filters also got in touch, as they are wanting to shift their businesses from China, with two already placing orders.

Altogether, the new business will be worth about $5 million a year. Now, look, at $5 million a year, that isn't the kind of company that gets a lot of attention here in Washington, DC, but I will tell you, in Ashtabula, OH, it makes a big difference. These are good jobs.

I thank President Trump, Secretary Lutnick, Secretary Bessent, and Ambassador Greer for their incredible work in putting together the most unbelievable trade deals that we have ever seen.

I could go on--I have pages of quotes--but I will save my colleague from having to listen to all of them.

Here is the summary: We have a 30-percent tariff on China. That is a great move. It is something that my colleague supported 25 years ago when they started to block that. We have a tariff at 15 percent from the EU. Our products can now go into the EU with no tariffs, a phenomenal deal.

With Japan, we have a historic investment in America of $550 billion and in South Korea a historic investment in America.

My former career was in the retail automobile business. I have talked to every CEO of every car company on Earth, and they all tell me the same thing: We are bringing more production to America. Instead of celebrating that, we are here trying to reverse course.

On top of that, a couple of other things are happening.

No. 1, we are getting record levels of tariff revenue--almost $150 billion into the U.S. Treasury from tariffs. Yet inflation has not ticked up at all. In fact, it is at the lowest point in 4 years.

I want to just throw one more statistic up--two more statistics up-- that haven't been talked about.

So this is data right from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The red line is employment from foreign-born citizens. The blue line is employment from native-born Americans. Since the beginning of the year, employment for foreign-born citizens has actually dropped while employment for American--native-born Americans--has gone up. That is a great result.

One other thing: Government employment has dropped, and private sector employment has gone up, which is another really important result.

And how does it all boil down? What is the conclusion?

Real wages--real wages--are up almost 4 percent, eclipsing inflation for the first time since the beginning of the first Trump administration.

What does that mean?

It means that people feel like they are getting ahead. They don't feel like fast food is a luxury. They feel like they have a little room here. This is because of the incredible work of this administration.

I know that my colleagues like to do a lot of shirts-and-skins exercise, like we are doing here on a beautiful Saturday morning in Washington, DC, where it seems like the temperature is always the same because we are always in this Chamber, confirming nominees through the most difficult process in Senate history.

But here is what we do know: We should be celebrating and thanking President Trump for having the steel backbone to have negotiated these incredible trade deals that are a massive--massive--victory to the American people.

I sat where the Presiding Officer sat while I listened to speech after speech after speech in early April. What did every speech have in common? The world was going to end. It was the apocalypse because of Liberation Day. What has been the result? A record stock market, low inflation, real wage growth, and the growth of native-born American employment. Small businesses love these policies.

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Mr. MORENO. Mr. President, I just want to clear the irony here that the person who is speaking right now has been a small business owner my entire life, and my colleague has never owned a business. So I know exactly what drives small businesses.

I have read many statements from small business owners that are thankful to President Trump for his tariff policies because what it is doing is it is bringing manufacturing back to America.

Now, I will acknowledge that there is a ``Pain Street,'' but it is not on Main Street; it is on Martha's Vineyard, where the globalists and the climate change cultists are waiting for their Senators to arrive after we leave here in Washington, DC, to make the annual pilgrimage in which they talk about the plight of the little people while they fly there on their private jets and enjoy caviar in their mansions.

Let me tell you what is happening in Chillicothe, OH. They are happy that there are more Kenworth trucks being made than Freightliners in Mexico. They are happy that the products that are made by working-class Ohioans are now on a level playing field by jobs that were shipped overseas, chasing slave labor that was enriching and building those mansions in Martha's Vineyard.

Now, it is ironic, too, and quite a shift, because there was a day when Democrats loved to advocate for the working man. I mentioned JFK. Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, has been a staunch supporter of President Trump's tariff policies despite campaigning aggressively against President Trump because he didn't know if he could trust him. But he knows now he can, and he knows that President Trump is actually putting the interests of the American worker above everything else.

Another Sean--apparently you have to be named ``Shawn'' to run a union--another Sean, Sean O'Brien, head of the Teamsters--I am young enough but still remember that maybe the unions were the ones that supported Democrats, but here we are.

Sean O'Brien says:

There's no secret what our position is as a union on tariffs.

He supports them because he knows those tariffs will produce more economic activity here in America.

So this is a very clear situation. My Democratic colleagues kept us in this Chamber for 27 hours in a row to block a bill that prevented the largest tax increase in American history. Had that bill not passed, I will tell you what would have happened to small businesses. They would have been destroyed. And there wasn't a single Democrat that voted to prevent that tax increase--27 hours, in fact, to block that tax increase. They blocked no income tax on tips, no income tax on overtime.

Now, on Martha's Vineyard, they don't worry about income tax on tips or overtime because they probably don't even pay it when they go out, and maybe they don't even like to pay it to their employees.

They blocked a $2,200 child tax credit that would have gone to zero. And maybe on Martha's Vineyard, they don't care about child tax credits, but in Chillicothe, OH, in Coshocton, OH, and in Lorain, OH, they absolutely do.

They blocked $1,000 Trump accounts--money that will go into an index fund that can grow so that when that baby becomes an adult, they have a nest egg, finally, so they don't have to live in their parents' basement and they can afford a home or a car.

By the way, let me just clear this misconception up--two things--and I will end so that we can get moving today to confirm the nominees that President Trump deserves.

No. 1--and my colleague in Massachusetts may not know this because he may not be somebody who is in the automobile market quite often--car prices are down. Let me repeat that again. Car prices are down this year. That means people are paying less money for cars right now than they were at the beginning of the year.

And guess what. Fifty-one percent of the cars sold in this country at the beginning of the year were made in this country. Now it is 56, and we are heading right to the sixties, and we are not going to stop. When I was a kid, that number used to be in the eighties.

So these tariff policies have been an incredible success.

Let me just speak to the chamber of commerce as a former small business owner. To say that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is an advocate for small business is like saying Hamas is an advocate for Israel's best interests.

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