Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Floor Speech

Colombia Free Trade Agreement

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Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California for yielding, and I thank him especially for gathering us together here for this Special Order.

Being mindful of the clock, there are a few points I would like to make. And one of them is to address our trade deficit. We have had a trade deficit over the last several years that has grown an average of about 20 percent a year. Now, it's flattened out in this last year because the weaker dollar has shifted so that we have more exports in proportion. However, I believe the dollar needs to be shored up. And why would a nation that has a trade deficit refuse to allow a trade agreement that would open up a country to allow our goods to go in?

I'm astonished continually at the continuing shift on the part of the Democrats. And I looked through the trade agreements that we have dealt with here since I have been in this Congress, and I'm thinking of trade agreements like Singapore and Chile and Australia and Morocco, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, DR-CAFTA. All of those gave us opportunities that were advantageous to us. And the logic in this is just as clear and simple: If you market something or if you're doing business with people, where you buy it from is where the jobs are. That's where the production is. We have production in the United States. We need to market more goods overseas. If we shore up the dollar, and I think we should, we're going to need to be more aggressive marketing our goods overseas. Colombia's sitting there waiting to open that up.

I have to say a couple kind words about our pork producers. They sold $8.5 million worth of pork into Colombia last year, not a lot. They're losing money on every head today. They need to open up this market. It would be in multiples if we would simply allow that tariff that's in Colombia to disappear, which would happen immediately if we could sign into this free trade agreement. That's some of the components.

But I am also more concerned about our relationships in the Western hemisphere. And as we watch Hugo Chavez teaming up and picking up the legacy of Fidel Castro and watching the unrest that's being promoted or watching tanks roll up to the border, these things are taking place in our hemisphere. And this Monroe Doctrine, I think, calls upon us to be good diplomats, good stewards of the money, and good promoters of trade, taking care of American jobs and protecting our opportunity to compete in the rest of the world. All of this comes together in this Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

What happened here in this Congress was a shameful act. And Americans have to be viewed as having character, the kind of character that holds up when a business deal is a deal. We did more than shake hands on this. This Congress passed it. The President signed it. This agreement was negotiated under terms that said this trade agreement will come to the floor of this House and it will be brought forward for a vote, up or down, in 90 days. That's the deal. That's the deal it was negotiated under. That's the deal that it should have been brought to the floor of this House under.

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Mr. KING of Iowa. If we took that position with every country on the globe, you could virtually guarantee our economy would collapse, not get stronger. We need to make every move that we can make to improve this economy. I'm really not as concerned as the pundits are, but it's prudent for us to open trade. Free trade, fair trade smart trade is a better code word for this, and it means jobs in America. The U.S. market is open to Colombia. They're saying, let's open our market to you. I'm happy to send Caterpillars down there. We buy them in my business. And I'm happy to send the pork down there that we produce and everything that we can compete with. This global market that we're involved in demands that we export, and the Western hemisphere demands that we lead. And that means we need to promote strong, strong relationships in the Western hemisphere. And as we watch the bullying tactics of Hugo Chavez, I think that cries out for us to shake hands with President Uribe and complete this Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

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