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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, soon the Senate will vote on the final passage of the new North American Free Trade Agreement. I am going to make just a few remarks. I know Senator Toomey is here to make remarks. Later, he is going to offer, I believe, some procedural requests.
The new NAFTA is a good deal for American workers because Democrats in this body and Democrats in the other body stopped the Trump administration from going ahead with business as usual on trade enforcement. There has even been an effort by several Members on the other side in the Senate to actually block enforcement dollars. With Chairman Grassley's help, we were able to prevent that.
If you write a trade agreement with weak enforcement, particularly on labor and environmental issues, my view is you sell out American workers and key industries, whether it is automobiles, whether it is technology, or whether it is manufacturing. Basically, you set up a race to the bottom on cheap wages and the treatment of labor.
I particularly want to thank Senator Brown, my colleague from Ohio, who for decades has led the fight for tough trade enforcement. We spoke yesterday on the floor about our effort. We worked on this side of the aisle, but we reached out to a lot of Senators on the other side of the aisle as well.
I just want to give an example of what the Brown-Wyden trade enforcement package does. In the past, it would take almost to eternity to bring trade enforcement action. I spelled out yesterday how the Brown-Wyden enforcement package speeds up the timeline for tough trade enforcement by more than 300 percent. That, in my view, throws a real lifeline--an actual lifeline to communities that are worried about whether they are going to have an economic heartbeat in the days ahead.
I also wanted to mention--and I am then going to yield to my colleague, and we are going to use this time so that everybody gets a chance to make some remarks--that this is the first-ever trade agreement in which the United States locks in strong rules on digital trade and technology. Back when the first NAFTA came about, you didn't have Senators with smartphones in their pocket. You didn't have the internet as the shipping lane of the 21st century. What we did in this part of the bill, which was really bipartisan, is we protected intellectual property. We prohibited shakedowns of data belonging to innovative American companies, and I was especially involved in making sure that we drew on established U.S. law to defend the small technology entrepreneurs working to build successful companies in a field dominated by a small number of Goliaths.
These rules on technology and trade ought to be the cornerstones of our trade policy in the years ahead because those rules on technology protect every single American industry--healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, you name it. It is how the United States also is going to fight back against authoritarian governments that use the internet as a tool to repress their own people, bully American businesses and workers, and meddle with the free speech rights of American citizens.
The bottom line here is that my colleague who sits right behind me, Senator Brown, was key to producing a bill that had the provisions and the prerequisite to getting a law, frankly, with tough trade law enforcement that brought, literally, dozens of Members of both the Senate and the House over to support this. I want to thank him and wrap up by saying--I am not sure that he is with us today here in the Senate Gallery--that Ambassador Bob Lighthizer deserves a special thanks today. He may be off around the world somewhere talking to additional trade ministers, looking for other opportunities to come up with tough future-oriented trade agreements. Ambassador Lighthizer is the hardest working man in the trade agreement business. I want to thank him for all his work. I have a difference of opinion with my colleague from Pennsylvania on these issues. We may have some procedure, but I think you are going to see Senators handle these issues over the next 20 minutes in a way that reflects the seriousness of this issue.
I know the Senator from Pennsylvania will speak next.
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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, first, I want to make sure that we can enter into the Record a thanks that is deserved to the bipartisan team here in the Senate that has made this day possible.
Second, on one substantive point, because I associate myself with the remarks of Chairman Grassley, I think we need to understand that what the Toomey procedural issue is all about is really that of a Trojan horse for rolling back an aggressive effort to enforce the rights that workers care about and that we all care about with respect to our land, air, and water. I know the Senator from Pennsylvania disagrees with it, but I just wanted to make that point.
The chairman is right with respect to the procedure. I just want people to understand what the substantive issue is. This is just a policy disagreement, and that is what the Senate is all about.
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