Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, some have called Trade Adjustment Assistance ``burial insurance'' since it delivers limited help after a job is dead and buried.

At a time when Fast Trackers are claiming that they will include over half of the world's economy, we need a TAA that is funded for more workers

at risk of job loss. Unfortunately, this particular TAA proposal is really short for ``Taking Away Assistance.''
It includes substantially less funding than the Administration has said was essential to protecting those who lose their jobs through expanded trade. Further, this TAA fails to restore coverage to thousands whose jobs may be exported.

In a very contrived process this morning, designed to obscure what is really happening and to remove accountability from Members of this House, desperate Fast Trackers and fast talkers have split up the Senate bill into two pieces--two votes--before they put it back together in exactly the same form it was when it first got to the House. And along the way, they have a self-executing rule so that it appears that Members are not voting to do what they are doing.

The first vote we take today at the end of this debate is on TAA. Vote ``no.'' Your vote of ``no'' offers an opportunity to achieve both better Trade Adjustment Assistance and better trade legislation, and your vote ``no'' will also ensure that you are not on record as voting to send a bill to the President, which is exactly what will happen if you vote ``yes,'' that cuts Medicare by $700 billion.

Reject this bill, and develop a better alternative that reflects our values and 21st century economic realities. What really needs ``adjusting'' here today is the no compromise, no amendment attitude on trade. This vote wouldn't be so close if this process had not been so closed.

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