Trans-Pacific Partnership
Floor Speech
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Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, on Sunday, during a joint press conference in Hannover, Germany, with Chancellor Angela Merkel, the President of the United States said this:
And with respect to Congress and the Trans-Pacific Partnership--
That is the big 5,000-page trade agreement the President is trying to move through Congress--
I think after the primary season is over--
After the primary season is over-- the politics settle down a little bit in Congress, and we'll be in a position to start moving forward. Because I know that we had a majority of members in the past who were in favor of this deal. Otherwise we wouldn't have gotten the authority for me to go ahead and fast track the agreement. But I think we all know that elections can sometimes make things a little more challenging, and people take positions, in part, to protect themselves from attacks during the course of election seasons.
I would suggest the American people should be very uneasy about their President making such a statement as that. We have already heard that there are plans by a number of forces and interest groups to try to slip this TPP through after the election in a lameduck congressional session.
Why would that be the case? Well, the President says it right here: The American people are uneasy about it. They are not for this. Support for it is sinking. Elections are turning on it. And it does not need to become law.
I am firmly opposed to this agreement. I believe it is bad for our country. It bothers me that if it is such a good deal, why don't they bring it forward? Why don't we have a debate here while elections are on? Why aren't people willing to go home and explain to their constituents how and why they voted the way they did and how and why they believe the way they do? What is wrong with that? Why wait until after, when things settle down a little bit, in the President's words, when people can't be held accountable by their constituents for the votes they cast or they think they may be able to slide away afterward?
I don't like this. I don't think it is the right thing to do. I think it is arrogant. What the President is fundamentally saying and what a lot of these special interest groups are saying is, well, we know you in Congress are so smart, and we know the President is smart. But, the people out here, they don't understand how smart we all are, and we just need to get this done, and so we will have this trade agreement. But we understand you probably shouldn't do it right now while elections are going on because, well, you might get your clock cleaned. They might vote you out of office. So we will see if we can't work up a way to pass it sometime in the future.
The President has made it clear that he intends to continue to push through this 5,544-page trade agreement that the American people don't want. Polls show consistent disapproval of the TPP. A March poll by Americans for Limited Government found that 51 percent of Americans did not know anything about it. I would say at least 50 percent of the Members of Congress don't know much about it. It is more than 5,000 pages. I have probably spent more time on it than the vast majority have, and it is rather difficult to read. No wonder the American people say they don't know a lot about it. But of those who claim to be familiar with it, 58 percent oppose it. There are a lot of reasons for this, and we will talk about it more.
Today, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman announced that they are beginning the 13th round of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership--TTIP, they call it--with the European Union in New York. So this is the second part of the fast-track. The fast-track guarantees a fast vote--without amendments, without the option to filibuster, on the floor of the Senate for less than 2 days, and you get an up-or-down vote. That is what fast-track does.
So we will have the Pacific agreement probably coming up first, and then we will have the TTIP, the Atlantic agreement, and then there is a third one, the Trade in Services Agreement. All of these are huge trade agreements, unlike anything we have seen before, creating in the Pacific an international trade union similar to the beginning of the European Union that Britain is trying to get out of. I think we should be very dubious about that.
How is the trade agreement faring in Europe? How about Germany, which is probably one of the leading trading countries in Europe? A poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a nonprofit organization that studies domestic and international politics, found that only 17 percent of Germans feel that TTIP--the transatlantic partnership--would be a good deal even though less than 2 years ago it had a 55-percent positive rating. This study found that the more people learn about the agreement, the more they oppose it. The same thing is happening in the United States, in my opinion.
The President has referred to the TPP as the ``most progressive trade deal in history.'' Its chapters create new labor and environmental provisions that the public really knows nothing about.
Even the economic data the White House promotes as proving the validity of the TPP, if we look at it carefully, we can see that their own report and study that they cite the most--that signing the agreement will decrease the rate of American manufacturing jobs by 120,000. How is this good for America? By their own study, we are going to lose 120,000 manufacturing jobs that we would have maintained had we not signed the agreement. Another study by Tufts University said the country will lose 400,000 jobs. We are going to go into the differences in the studies, we are going to see the assumptions utilized in the model the President cites, and we are going to see that the assumptions they made are not reasonable. They are extreme assumptions--assumptions that would never occur in the next 15 years as they assume they will occur. No wonder they can justify positive numbers with those kinds of assumptions.
I think all of us have to begin to reveal--and the American people need to be more alert--how bad this international agreement really is, how it will not positively affect the lives of most Americans. It is just not going to do so.
We will look at how the Korean trade deal that I supported in 2011 came nowhere close to being beneficial to the United States. In 2011, when President Obama signed the deal, the President said that it would increase American exports by $10 billion to South Korea. I thought that was a good thing. It sounded pretty good, but their estimates were way off.
The model that experts used to study the Korean trade deal is the same one they are using to study the TPP, and so we have a pretty good test: Did we increase exports by $10 billion each year to South Korea, as the model suggested? Well, their imports to us increased by $12 billion, and as of last year, we only increased our exports to Korea by less than a couple of hundred million dollars more than in 2011. So we didn't get any increase at all--virtually none. They had a huge increase to us, and our trade deficit with our allies and friends in South Korea increased 280 percent. This is a serious matter.
The same thing happened: They used this same computer model when we signed the agreement with China in 2000. We then had a little less than $70 billion in trade deficit with China. They assumed our exports to China would grow at the same rate as China's exports to the United States would grow. Did that happen? No. What is the trade deficit with China today? Pushing $400 billion. Our trade deficit went up 6 percent again last year.
So who is right here: The American people, who are worried about their jobs, their wages, their incomes, or the experts who promised all these grand things if we would just sign these agreements and everybody is going to be better off for it? I think the American people are the ones who have been proven right by this data.
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Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, the President does not need to be threatening our allies in Britain about the decision of their own people on whether to exit from the European Union. They are not happy with how things are going in the European Union. A lot of people are concerned about it. It is heading toward a close vote. The people of the United Kingdom can make their own decision without hearing advice or threats from the President of the United States. I don't blame them for being offended by it. This is certainly not an acceptable position for the President to take.
Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to share these remarks. I want to push back from the President's recent statements about this trade agreement, how he plans to move it through when people aren't watching. I also think Congress needs to speak and assert that we affirm the right of the people of the UK to decide whether to remain in the European Union.
I thank the Chair.
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