Statement on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement Implementation Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, when the Trump administration unveiled their original version of this proposal, it was stunning to see how weak it was in terms of trade enforcement. When you write a proposal with weak trade enforcement, particularly on labor and environmental issues, you sell out American workers and you launch a corporate race to the bottom of cheap wages and the treatment of labor.

Senator Brown and I decided that was unacceptable, and we were going to create a trade enforcement regime with real teeth. We worked with Senators here; we worked with Senators on the other side of the aisle and in the other body. To give you an example of what this means with respect to enforcing trade law, we sped up the timeline by more than 300 percent.

The second point--just very quickly--what this proposal does is bring technology and trade policy into the 21st century. When the last North American Free Trade Agreement was considered, nobody had a smartphone. So what we did is protect intellectual property; we prohibited shakedowns of data belonging to innovative companies; and on something I care deeply about, we drew on established U.S. law to defend small tech entrepreneurs working to build successful companies in a field dominated by Goliaths.

I urge my colleagues to support this proposal and once again thank Bob Lighthizer, the hardest working man in the trade agreement business.

I urge a ``yes'' vote.

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