IRS Bureaucracy Reduction and Judicial Review Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, today, at this moment, we begin the debate on one of the most important bills to come in front of the Senate this year, to guarantee that Americans can find a more level playing field as we compete in the world economy to show that Americans should not be patsies for other countries that are cheating and altering records and information they submit to trade authorities.

This is an opportunity to close an 85-year-old loophole that has allowed us to import products produced by slave labor and child labor and to fix our currency system so countries and their companies, especially in East Asia and South Asia--mostly East Asia--cannot continue to cheat and sell into our country with a bonus and penalize us when we try to sell our products to their countries.

This body delivered one strong message this week which was unprecedented. I can't think of the last time the Senate spoke with such an emphatic voice on a trade issue. The simple message: We cannot have trade promotion without trade enforcement.

We should not be passing new agreements while doing nothing, which the Senate tried to do on Tuesday, but the Senate stood up and said no. We should not be passing new agreements while doing nothing to enforce existing laws and support American companies dealing with unfair competition.

We need to stand up particularly for our small businesses, which are always hurt to a much greater degree than large businesses. When a large company in Cleveland, Toledo or Lima shuts down production and moves overseas to Xi'an, Beijing or Wuhan, China, so they can get a tax break from our government--amazingly enough, this body will not close that tax loophole--and sell products back to our country, that company's bottom line may be a bit better, but the supply chain for those large companies--the companies in our communities in Lima, Toledo, Mansfield, and Wooster--that sell to those big companies have lost their biggest customers in far too many cases. Those businesses go out of business, those workers get laid off, those plants close, and we know what happens. That is why we especially need to stand up for those small businesses that play by the rules and are drowning from a set of imports from countries that manipulate their currency and practice illegal dumping. Dumping is when companies subsidize water, capital, land, labor costs or other inputs, such as energy, and sell under the real cost of production into the United States--that kind of illegal dumping.

It is one thing to talk about statistics, but I want to stop and think about the costs of imports to our companies, communities, and families.

In the State of Pennsylvania, as the Presiding Officer knows, especially between Pittsburgh and Philly or Western Pennsylvania, the area I am more familiar with because I represent the adjoining State, we see time after time companies in small towns--when a company shuts down in a place like Jackson, OH, or Chillicothe, OH, so often because of the size of the town, both the husband and wife each lose their jobs because they both work at that company, their entire family income is wiped out, and they are likely to lose their home to foreclosure. We know all of those problems that happen because we don't enforce our trade rules. That is why I want us to stop and think about the real costs to families, communities, and companies.

In Ohio, we have seen how dumping by Korean companies has hurt our steel industry. Neither President Bush nor President Obama has stepped up on trade the way each had promised in their campaigns, and neither has stepped up the way that they should to preserve our workers, our businesses, and our livelihoods. We both promised, on Korea, thousands--that there would be tens of thousands of new jobs, billions in increased exports for our companies. Yet the reality of the Korea trade agreement was absolutely the opposite of that. We had major job loss and a major loss in the import-export ratio because of that South Korea trade agreement they pushed on the U.S. Congress, and the people here too willingly passed.

Natural gas production has increased demand. I will explain Korea for a moment. Natural gas production has increased demand for the world-class tubular steel made in plants such as U.S. Steel in Lorain, Youngstown, and Trumbull County. Tubular steel is the steel piping that is particularly strong and durable. It is subjected to great pressure and great heat as they drill for natural gas--in so-called fracking--or they drill for oil.

Mr. President, 8,000 workers in 22 States make these Oil Country Tubular Goods. Each one of those jobs supports another seven positions in the supply chain. We know when we talk about manufacturing, it is never just the manufacturing jobs, as important as they are, it is the jobs in the entire supply that go into the assembly of the airplane or the automobile or the steel production of Oil Country Tubular Goods. These producers increasingly lose business to foreign competitors that are not playing by the rules. Imports for OCTG, Oil Country Tubular Goods, have doubled since 2008. By some measures, imports account for somewhat more than 50 percent of the pipes being used by companies drilling for oil and gas in the United States.

Korea has one of the world's largest steel industries, but get this, not one of these pipes that Korea now dumps in the United States--illegally subsidized--is ever used in Korea for drilling because Korea has no domestic oil or gas production. In other words, Korea has created this industry only for exports and has been successful because they are not playing fair. So their producers are exporting large volumes to the United States, the most open and attractive market in the world, at below-market prices. That is clear evidence that our workers and manufacturers are being cheated, and it should be unacceptable to the Members of this body. It hurts our workers, our communities, and our country. It is time to stop it.

I toured Lorain's best U.S. Steel plant in 2013 and saw the No. 6 quench and temper finishing line, which was part of a $100 million expansion project.

The naysayers who talk about our country, workers, and businesses say we cannot compete because we are not up-to-date or our workers are not producing--all the whining from these naysayers who support these trade policies is insulting to our workers, insulting to our communities, and insulting to our small businesses. They say we are not modern enough.

Well, look at the investment. I have seen the $100 million investment in Lorain, for instance, and what that means. The first time in the history of steel production in this world, ArcelorMittal workers created about 1 ton about 5 years ago. When they passed this threshold, 1 person-hour created 1 ton of steel. They are the most productive steelworkers in the world, working in the most productive steel company in the world.

The expansion project with Lorain's U.S. Steel plant was made possible, in part, because we were able to crack down on Chinese steel pipe imports that flooded the market with illegal and cheap products. They made this investment because we won that trade case. Then, along came Korea to again try to inflict the same damage on our producers and our workers. It is clear that once again we need to ensure that other Nations don't unfairly dump steel into the U.S. market.

Last year, I visited the same plant and joined in with workers, managers, and union leaders to send one message: It is time for America to stand up to these lawbreakers; pure and simple, strip it all away--these countries are lawbreakers.

Here is the bad news: In January, U.S. Steel--in part because of Korea's dumping--announced 614 temporary layoffs at the plant in Lorain on Lake Erie. Those layoffs began in March.

I spoke on the floor before about one of the U.S. steelworkers I met, Ryan, who has been out of work for weeks. He has four kids at home and doesn't know when or if he will be back at work. Will his home be foreclosed down the road if he can't go back to work? He has played by the rules. He has been living a responsible life, by taking care of his kids, paying his mortgage, engaged in the union and community as a good, strong, productive worker.

There are hundreds more like Ryan in Lorain and around Ohio.

In March, Republic Steel in Lorain announced 200 temporary layoffs. I say ``temporary'' because the company is hopeful that our government will enforce trade rules and that the dumping of steel will abate a bit.

TMK is one of the largest producers of oil country tubular goods in the world, with a facility in Brookfield, OH, north of Youngstown. Since 2008, the company has invested $2 billion in their U.S. operations. They are keeping up on technology and modernizing their plant with very productive workers. But how do they compete with Korea or China or other nations that are cheating?

Other companies make similar investments to stay on the cutting edge, but instead of expanding production to keep up with increasing demand, these companies operate under tighter and tighter margins and lay off workers. Last week, TMK announced plans to reduce operating hours at three of its facilities and completely idled another one.

I visited Byer Steel in Cincinnati. I spoke with Mr. Byer just yesterday when I met with some steel company executives, many of them from small businesses like his, where I first announced the Level the Playing Field Act to his company in Cincinnati.

American companies--Byer, TMK, U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, so many others--know firsthand that they are not in a fair fight. These manufacturers across Ohio and all over our country suffer enough from unfair trade practices distorting the market. It is their workers who suffer even more. Think about what even a temporary layoff can do to a family. They are facing mounting bills, facing mounting uncertainty. They may have to start to turn to credit cards and payday lenders to get by, and then the downward spiral begins.

I don't think too many in this body who are dressed like this and who have good-paying jobs and titles and far too often an adoring staff end up--we don't think much about this, but think about the laid-off worker who has for 7 years--she and her husband have lived in Lorain, where I used to live, which is an industrial city west of Cleveland--they have lived in Lorain and paid their mortgage. They are involved in their kids' activities in soccer and school and go to the programs at school. They are living lives the way we hope they would. But then she loses her good-paying, 18-dollar-an-hour job. She has a mortgage she meets every month. She has bills she pays every month. Then she loses her job. She faces the uncertainty of what happens next, and she faces a sharply declined income. At some point, her kids understand their mom lost her job and their dad's hours have been cut back. Then they face the question--and this is what we don't think much about in this body, people who dress like us and make good incomes and have good benefits and have a staff who helps them--then she has to sit down with her kids and say: We may lose our home because we can't keep up with these bills. It is not because they speculated, not because they stole, not because they are morally inadequate in some ways; simply because they lost their job.

My State--and the Presiding Officer's State is not too far behind this, I don't think--my State for 14 years in a row had more foreclosures than the year before. That is not because Ohioans are irresponsible; it is because Ohioans have lost so many of these manufacturing jobs. They were paying their bills and meeting their obligations and raising their kids, and then all of a sudden they couldn't.

So they have to face their 12-year-old daughter and say: Honey, we are going to have to move. We can't afford to keep this house anymore. I don't know where we are going to move. I don't know what school you are going to go to. I am sorry.

I don't think people around this place think very much about the human face of these kinds of decisions. That is why this is so important.

We can do something about this. When jobs are lost due to cheap, flooded, illegal imports and at the same time we aren't increasing our exports, we need to do all we can to stop this practice and protect our workers.

The other side will say we are increasing our exports. We are a bit, but the imports are much higher in almost every one of these cases. That is why we need to pass this Customs bill that incorporates the Level the Playing Field Act to crack down on foreign companies that are cheating. We welcome competition. We are a competitive country. We succeed in competing among ourselves and around the world. But it has to be fair; it has to be a level playing field. That is why the Level the Playing Field Act, title V of this Customs bill, is so very important.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time during the quorum calls be equally divided between the parties.

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