Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act--Continued

Floor Speech

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Ms. WARREN. Thank you, Mr. President.

I want to start by saying thank you to Senator Brown for his extraordinary leadership on this issue and his determination that voices be heard around this country on this trade debate, that the people who are actually affected be heard from. I say thank you very much to Senator Brown for all he has done here.

AMENDMENT NO. 1327

Mr. President, I join with Senator Heitkamp, Senator Manchin, and a number of other Senators to propose a simple change to the fast-track bill, a change that would prevent Congress from using this expedited process on any trade deal that includes so-called investor-state dispute settlement provisions.

I come to the floor to urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

ISDS is an obscure process that allows big companies to go to corporate-friendly arbitration panels that sit outside any court system in order to challenge laws they don't like. These panels can force taxpayers to write huge checks to those big corporations, with no need to file a suit in court, no appeals, and no judicial review.

Most Americans don't think the minimum wage or antismoking regulations are trade barriers, but a foreign corporation used ISDS to sue Egypt after Egypt raised its minimum wage. Tobacco giant Philip Morris went after Australia and Uruguay to stop their rules to cut smoking rates. Under the TPP, corporations can use these corporate-friendly panels to challenge rules right here in America.

It wasn't always this way. ISDS has been around for a while, and from 1959 to 2002 there were fewer than 100 claims in the whole world. But, boy, has that changed. In 2012 alone, there were 58 cases. Corporate lawyers have started figuring out just how powerful a tool these panels can be for corporate clients. The huge financial penalties that these cases can impose on taxpayers have already caused New Zealand to give up on some tough antismoking rules. It has already caused Germany to pull back from clean water protections, and it has caused Canada to stand down on environmental protections.

If that worries you, you are not alone. Experts from all over the political spectrum--conservatives and liberals, economists and legal scholars on the left and the right, opponents of trade deals and supporters of trade deals--have all argued that these corporate-friendly panels should be dropped from our future trade deals.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that we should not give ``investors the power to sue foreign governments to weaken their environmental and public health rules.''

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, and other top American legal experts noted that ``the threat and expense of ISDS proceedings have forced nations to abandon important public policies'' and that ``laws and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at risk in a process insulated from democratic input.''

The head of the trade policy program at the conservative CATO Institute has said that ISDS ``raises serious questions about democratic accountability, sovereignty, checks and balances, and the separation of powers''--concerns that ``libertarians and other free market advocates should share.''

ISDS is a major part of the reason why, no matter what promises are made, huge trade deals often just tilt the playing field further in favor of big multinational corporations. If a country wants to adopt strong new protections for workers, such as an increase in the minimum wage, a corporation can use these corporate-friendly panels to seek millions--or billions--in taxpayer compensation because the new rules might eat into the company's profits.

But, boy, it doesn't work in the other direction. If a country wants to undermine worker rights by allowing child labor or slave labor or paying workers pennies an hour, there is no special worker-friendly process for challenging that. Instead, advocates for workers are stuck begging their governments to bring enforcement actions and protect their rights. That process can take years, if the government responds at all. In fact, just yesterday my office released a 15-page report detailing how for decades both Republican and Democratic Presidents made the same promises over and over and over again about how good these deals would be for workers, and both Republican and Democratic Presidents failed to enforce the labor standards promises in those trade agreements.

Giving corporations special rights to challenge our laws outside our legal system is a terrible idea. Experts from every place on the political spectrum have concluded that it is unfair, it undermines the rule of law, it threatens American sovereignty, and it creates an end-run around the democratic process. I urge my colleagues to support this amendment so we can keep these corporate-friendly panels out of future trade agreements.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

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