Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, before the Senator leaves the floor, I want to thank the Senate majority leader for working with us in a constructive fashion to make it possible for all of the vital parts of the trade package to be considered. I look forward to working closely with him.
Colleagues, I will say that what has been done through the cooperation of the majority leader and the minority leader is, in effect, to say that trade enforcement will be the first bill to be debated; and in doing so, it drives home yesterday's message of 13 protrade Democrats who together said robust enforcement of our trade laws is a prerequisite to a modern trade policy. In making this the first topic for debate, it is a long overdue recognition that vigorous trade enforcement has to be in the forefront, not in the rear, and a recognition that the 1990 NAFTA trade playbook is being set aside.
I am going to be brief at this point, but I would just like to give a little bit of history as to how we got to this point.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. WYDEN. Before he leaves the floor, I want to thank Senator Brown for again and again putting in front of the committee and all Senators the importance of this issue. I just want to read a sentence from the paper yesterday that really puts a human face on this enforcement issue that Senator Brown has so often come back to. A quote in the New York Times says: ``Candy makers want to preserve a loophole.''
Now, this is the loophole that was closed in the Customs bill. The article goes on to say that ``Candy makers want to preserve a loophole ..... that allows them to import African cocoa harvested by child labor.''
What Senator Brown has said is without, in effect, this enforcement language, this vigorous enforcement language that is in the Customs bill, we would basically be back in yesteryear's policy, back in what we had for decades and decades, where youngsters would be exploited in this way.
So we are going to talk about trade here for a few days. I think colleagues and--certainly my colleagues on the Finance Committee know that I strongly support expanded trade. I look at the globe. There are going to be 1 billion middle-class people in the developing world in 2025. They are going to have a fair amount of money to spend. We want them to spend on the goods and services produced in the United States.
So we support expanding those opportunities, increasing those exports. The reality is expanding trade exports and enforcing the trade law are two sides of the same coin. Because what happens at home--I had community meetings in all of my counties, had several in the last couple of weeks. The first question that often comes up is a citizen will say: I hear there is talk about a new trade deal. Well, how about first enforcing the laws that are on the books?
That is why the group of 13 protrade Senators yesterday wanted to weigh in, right at the outset of this debate, talking about how important trade enforcement is to a policy that I call trade done right--trade down right, a modern trade policy. I am going to be brief in opening this discussion, but I want to spend a few minutes describing how we got to this place.
A few weeks ago, the Finance Committee met and passed a bipartisan package of four bills. These were more than a year in the making. The message I sought to send right at the outset was a message that would respond to all the people in this country who want to know if you are doing more than just going back to NAFTA. Those four bills suggest that this will be very different.
The first, the trade promotion bill, the TPA as it is called, helps rid our trade policies of excessive secrecy. The reason this is so important is the first thing people say is, whether it is in South Carolina or Oregon or anywhere else: What is all of this excessive secrecy about? If you believe strongly in trade and you want more of it, why would you want to have all of this needless secrecy that just makes people so convinced that you are kind of sort of hiding things? So we have made very dramatic changes in that area.
A second strengthens and expands the support system for our workers. It is known as trade adjustment assistance. This is to make sure that when there are changes in the private economy, changes that so often take place and cause workers to see positions they have had be affected, this is a section of trade policy that gives them a chance, almost a springboard, into another set of job opportunities.
The third would finally put, as I have said, trade enforcement into high gear so we can crack down on trade cheats and protect American workers and exports. The reality is trade enforcement is a jobs bill. It is protecting jobs. That is another reason it is so important.
The fourth, which has been touched on by our distinguished colleagues, the Senators from Georgia and Delaware, involves the trade preference programs that are so crucial to both our employers and developing countries. Taken together, the bills form a package of trade policies that are going to help our country create more high-skill, high-wage jobs in my State and across the land.
As I have said so often, if you wanted to explain what a modern trade policy is in a sentence, what you would say is: This is the kind of approach that helps us grow things in America, make things in America, add value to them in America, and then ship them somewhere, particularly if you look to that developing world where there are going to be, in just a few years, 1 billion middle-class consumers. That strikes me as a real economic shot in the arm that will be of long-term benefit to our people.
Now, with respect to enforcement, I want to take just a few minutes to talk about why I think this is an appropriate opening step in the legislative process. Now, I already talked about the 13, 14 protrade Democrats who got together yesterday and weighed in as a group. Why we did it is that trade enforcement in that particular bill, which is part of the initial debate here, is a jobs bill. It is a cornerstone of a new trade approach that is going to reject the status quo.
As the President said, to his credit, during the State of the Union Address, ``Past trade deals have not always lived up to the hype.'' My own view is a lot of that can be attributed to subpar trade enforcement. That, in my view, is because so many of the same old enforcement tools from the NAFTA era and decades prior just are not the right kind of tool to get the job done in 2015.
Our competitors overseas use shell companies, fraudulent records, and sophisticated schemes to play cat and mouse with U.S. Customs authorities. Our competitors overseas, in a number of instances, intimidate American firms into relocating factories or surrendering our intellectual property. Our competitors often spy on our companies and trade enforcers to steal secrets and block our efforts at holding them accountable.
To mask their activities, they hide their paper trails and engage in outright fraud. For a number of years, I chaired the trade subcommittee of the Finance Committee. I can tell you, these examples I have given of modern challenges is just touching the surface of what we found in our investigation. At one point, we set up a sting operation to try to catch people who were merchandise laundering.
Not only does our trade enforcement need to catch up to these schemes, we have to have a trade enforcement policy that stays ahead of the game. That is why the bipartisan enforcement package, the Customs package, will take enforcement up to a higher level. This bill raises the bar for all of our trade enforcers, whether it is the Customs agents at the border checking inbound shipments, the Commerce Department investigator looking into an unfair trade petition or the lawyer from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative following up on possible violations of trade agreements.
So I want to just quickly tick through a few of the major parts of this trade enforcement package. A proposal that I pushed for a number of years to include will help Customs crack down on foreign companies that try to get around the rules by hiding their identity and sending their products on hard-to-trace shipping routes.
Another will close a shameful loophole--a shameful loophole that Senator Brown and I just talked about--that allows products made with forced and child labor to be sold in our country. A third will build what I call an unfair trade alert to help identify when American jobs and exports are under stress before the damage is done. With this early warning system in effect, you will have warning bells ringing earlier and more loudly than ever before when a country attempts to undercut an American industry like China recently tried with solar panels.
I think that is especially important, because when you are home and you are listening to companies and workers and organizations talk about trade enforcement, they say: You know, it just gets to us too late. By the time somebody back there in Washington, DC, is talking about enforcing the trade laws, the lights have gone out at the plant, the workers have had their lives shattered, and the community is feeling pain from one end to another.
So the point of the early warning system is we now have the kind of technology and access to the kind of information that can set off these early warning signals. That is what the unfair trade alert provision is all about.
Fourth, for the first time in decades, the Congress would set out clear enforcement priorities with the focus on jobs and growth that will build real accountability and follow through in our trade enforcement system.
Finally, it includes a proposal from Senator Brown that goes a long way toward ensuring that our trade enforcers use the full strength of our antidumping and countervailing duty laws to fight unfair tactics. I said months ago, repeatedly, making it very clear, when Chairman Hatch and I began working on this package, that strengthening trade law enforcement was at the very top of the list of my priorities.
I did, in starting all of those discussions and the debate, repeatedly come back to the fact that for those of us who are protrade, who think it is absolutely key for the kind of export-related jobs and growth that we need in this country, we have to shore up trade enforcement because it is not credible to say that you are pushing for a new trade agreement if people do not find it credible that you are going to enforce the laws that are already existing on the books and relate to the past trade agreements.
So strengthening trade enforcement has been at the top of my list of priorities for many, many years. The Finance Committee passed this enforcement measure with a voice vote. So that ought to indicate alone that this was not some topic of enormous controversy. We had votes on the trade promotion act, we had votes on the trade adjustment act. There was pretty vigorous debate on those--voice vote on the enforcement provision and the Customs package because it includes so much of what I think Members, actually on both sides of the trade debate, feel strongly about.
I have talked about why as a protrade Democrat I feel so strongly about enforcement. My colleague Senator Brown speaks eloquently about another point of view, but he feels strongly about trade enforcement. So I am very pleased the Senate is on this bill, is beginning debate on this legislation. I am thoroughly committed to getting this legislation passed before we leave for the recess. No one can ever make guarantees, but I am sure going to pull out all the stops to do it.
I just want, as we close the opening of this debate, to thank both the majority leader and the minority leader for working with myself and Chairman Hatch and others to get us to this point.
We had a bipartisan effort in the Finance Committee, and we are very pleased to see the distinguished Presiding Officer join us on the Finance Committee. We had a bipartisan package, as the distinguished Presiding Officer knows, in the Finance Committee, which passed overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis.
Now, starting with this debate and with what is ahead of us, we have a chance to build on the bipartisan work that took place in the Finance Committee. It is very appropriate that we begin this discussion focusing on trade enforcement, as the 14 protrade Democrats did yesterday in making an announcement with respect to the importance of this topic. It is going to be a good debate.
The stakes are enormously high. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to get this legislation passed and to get a bill to the President of the United States to sign.
I yield the floor.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source