Providing for Consideration of the Senate Amendment to H.R. 2146, Defending Public Safety Employees' Retirement Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. First, we were all on the fast track, then the slow track with postponement into July, and now we are back on rush-hour scheduling, being told that fast track, which has been mangled in the meantime with new changes, has to be approved by high noon today.

Railroading this bill through now will deny any opportunity to ensure that our trade policy gets on the right track. The fast-trackers have rejected every constructive improvement for a better trade measure that we have advanced. And even these fast-trackers, if they are really candid with the American people, would concede there is not a Member of this Congress who knows what is in this agreement to the extent that the Vietnamese Politburo does. Because so much of it has been secreted, we do not have one word that has been made public or accessible to us about how it is that Vietnam will enforce provisions to ensure greater worker freedom and opportunity instead of being part of a race to the bottom.

What we do know about this fast-track agreement from a recent Canadian ruling, Bilcon v. Canada, is that corporate panels will be empowered to charge taxpayers millions of dollars for the privilege of maintaining public health and safety laws. The language to which my colleague from Texas has referred about preserving American laws is really meaningless because, yes, they are preserved, but when your city or your State acts to protect you, foreign corporations are accorded more rights than American businesses, and they can demand millions for keeping our laws in place.

What we do know is that, since last week, this railroad has picked up some mighty unsavory characters. The irony is that on the very day Pope Francis is formally releasing his encyclical on global warming, this railroad has picked up a troubling new provision that would deny any opportunity to address the greatest environmental challenge that our world faces.

Even Trans-Pacific Partnership supporters concede that it looks like a charter for corporate America rather than a high-level trade agreement. The Financial Times said, ``In too many aspects, it looks like a charter for corporate America.''

We learn, I think, more from USTR's past failures than from its current promises. USTR has never in its history successfully challenged worker or environmental abuses by any of our foreign trading partners. Usually the reason that USTR fails is that it doesn't really try. It doesn't seem to have a belief in law enforcement when it comes to worker and environmental abuse. In Guatemala, it took it eight years to even bring a dispute. In Honduras, it took nearly four years to issue another bureaucratic report. In Peru, we cannot get the audit that USTR was responsible for obtaining.

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