May 12,2015

Wyden Floor Statement on Trade Legislation Cloture Vote

I want to be clear that I am very interested in working with the Majority Leader and all of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to find a bipartisan path to get back to the trade legislation at the earliest possible time. Just briefly, I want to describe why it was so important to senators to tackle these issues on a bipartisan basis in the Finance Committee.

A few weeks ago, the Finance Committee came together to send four trade bills to the Senate floor. One overhauls Trade Promotion Authority and helps strip the secrecy out of trade policy. Another strengthens the support system for America’s workers by expanding Trade Adjustment Assistance. The third puts our trade enforcement into high gear to crack down on trade cheats. And the fourth renews trade programs that are crucial to American manufacturers.

Together, these bills would form a legislative package that would throw out the 1990s NAFTA playbook on trade. It’s an opportunity to enact fresh, middle-class trade policies that will create high-skill, high-wage jobs in Oregon and across the country. That opportunity is lost if this package of four bills gets winnowed down to two.

Dropping the enforcement bill, in particular, would be legislative malpractice. The calculation here is very simple. The Finance Committee gave the Senate a bipartisan trade enforcement bill that will protect American jobs and promote American exports, which are two propositions that everybody in this chamber supports. This legislation closes a shameful loophole that allows for products made with forced and child labor to be sold in the U.S. This is 2015, and there is absolutely no room for a loophole that allows slavery in American trade policies. If the decision is made to drop this bipartisan legislation, that shameful loophole will live on.

Any Senator who goes home and extolls the virtues of job-creating trade deals has an obligation to see that our trade enforcement is tough, effective, and built on American values, and that’s what this bipartisan enforcement bill is all about. Without proper enforcement, no trade deal will ever live up to the hype. This enforcement bill is a jobs bill, plain and simple, and it’s got to get to the president’s desk.

Some elements of this package represent priorities that have traditionally belonged to Republicans. Other elements are traditionally Democratic. But taken as a whole, this is a bipartisan package that both sides of the Finance Committee supported strongly with the understanding that its component parts would be linked together. This stool cannot stand with two legs.

The Senate should not begin debate until there’s a clear path forward for each of these four bills. So I urge my colleagues to continue down the Finance Committee’s bipartisan route and find a path that moves the Senate back to considering this legislation.

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