Sander Levin

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, so the speakers will be in what order?

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Dooley). (Mr. DOOLEY of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin), a distinguished member of the Committee on Ways and Means.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to allow a nonmember of the Committee on Ways and Means to control the balance of the time yielded to me until I am able to return to the Chamber.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt). (Mr. HOLT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, socialism? Teddy Roosevelt's idea? Members come here with all the talk about fairness and about women and minorities, we are talking about 2 percent of the decendents in this country, the very wealthy; that is what we are talking about. What is the problem? The substitute addresses them, family farms? Ninety-eight or 90 percent of the family farms will be taken out of an estate tax by the substitute. Small businesses? Only 1/10 of 1 percent are subject to the estate tax. Members come here raising the banner of all of these small businesses. We are talking about a small portion of them, and the vast majority of them will be taken care of by the substitute. And all of the others who are subject to the estate tax, the substitute addresses their needs faster than your bill. In a sense, those of us who are on the other side of this issue have lost the propaganda battle. Members have managed to move an estate tax to a death tax, but I have no hesitation to go back to my district and to talk about what the impact of this repeal would mean for 98 percent of my constituents, 98 percent. I will talk about Members coming here yesterday and not being able to fund Head Start, not being able to fund training; and we are going to give, 10 years from now, a $50 billion tax cut to the very wealthy in this country? I will take that battle on any time.

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, they say that in politics, where you stand depends on where you sit. But the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations bill the Republican leadership has brought to the floor looks bad from every seat in the House. The bill fails our kids. It would undo the progress we've made toward improving the quality of education for every child by eliminating funding for the President's plan to hire 100,000 teachers, a plan we made a bipartisan down payment on last year. It would also force our children and teachers to continue working in overcrowded schools with leaky roofs and crumbling buildings, because this bill provides no funding for the President's school construction initiative. Finally, it provides ten percent less funding than the President requested for Head Start, guaranteeing that we will not be able to provide preschool education to all children who need it. The bill fails families. The Baby Boomers are often called the ``sandwich generation'' because they often have to care for their children and their elderly parents. This bill fails those caregivers at both ends. It denies funding for the Family Caregiver Program, which provides support for 250,000 Americans who care for elderly or disabled relatives at home. It also cuts in half the President's increase in funding for child care, which will prevent 80,000 eligible families from getting help with child care. The bill fails senior citizens. This bill short-changes important senior programs like Meals-on-Wheels. It also shows the Republican Party's true colors on Medicare and Social Security by slashing funding for the Social Security Administration and the Health Care Financing Administration. Those agencies make sure seniors get their Social Security checks on time and receive the health care they're entitled to. Cutting the budgets of agencies that do this important work puts all seniors at risk. The bill fails workers. This bill would, for the sixth year in a row, delay a Department of Labor regulation which would help to prevent 300,000 workers from being injured at work. Neither does it provide enough funding to operate the Unemployment Insurance program, which protects workers who lose their jobs. It cuts funding for worker training programs that help people get better-paying jobs with benefits. The bill fails millions of Americans who suffer from deadly diseases. Over the past 3 years, Congress has made three installments on a bipartisan promise to double funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary source of medical research in the United States. This year's increase is only six percent, far less than the fifteen percent increase needed to reach our goal in five years. Finally, the bill fails the taxpayers. Over the past few years, the Department of Health and Human Services had dramatically reduced fraud and waste in the Medicare program. This bill slashes funding for HHS' anti-fraud activities. The supreme irony here is that while the Republican Party is denying necessary funding for education, medical research and seniors, they plan to bring a tax bill to the Floor tomorrow that showers hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts on the very richest people in America. What does this say about the Majority's priorities. This bill fails kids, families, seniors, workers, and taxpayers. It does not deserve the support of the House, and I urge its defeat.

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, my brother, for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and especially, if I might, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Bereuter). I want to comment briefly on some of the arguments here, for example, the job loss, the reference to 800,000, based, it is said, on an ITC report. But here is what the ITC says, that that briefing paper in several ways misrepresents the work and the findings of the ITC. But China will become increasingly a competitor, and that is why we have an anti-surge provision, the strongest in American law. It is also said China never has abided by a trade agreement. That is not true. They have abided in part in some. But it is going to be a special challenge to implement compliance by China, and that is why we have in our proposal additional resources and a provision for an annual review within the WTO sought by the U.S. Human rights, the annual review has not been an effective mechanism. It was not used after Tianenman, and there is no strategy for its effective use in the future. We can do better. We can do better. The Helsinki Commission-type will help us. It will be up to us to make sure it will do better than that. That commission worked despite, not because of, the Soviet Union. We should not isolate China, nor should we in the U.S. isolate ourselves from pressing China to move in the right direction. Passing PNTR will allow us to actively engage China and constructively confront it. Rejecting PNTR would likely lead to chaos in our relationship with China, making both active engagement and constructive confrontation far more difficult. This debate is about difficult judgments about a huge country far away, and about immense pressures much closer to home. Democracy is about resolving competing and conflicting pressures. Taking these pressures fully into account, there are important occasions when we must rise above them. With leadership, a democracy can be more than the sum of particular pressures. Today the challenge before us in this House is to exercise such leadership. Today the challenge is before us. Let us meet that challenge.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for asking about this commission that is now part of this legislation. This is a unique commission, high level, executive, and congressional. There will be 18 Members of Congress. There will be five members, high level from the executive. So it will be monitoring human rights, the rule of law, full-time staff, every day, every month, not just one time a year. It is going to be required to report to us every year. This commission will be empowered to make recommendations to this Congress, recommendations for action by the Congress or by the President. Its recommendations could include actions by the United States Representative to IMF or to the World Bank or legislation and recommendations regarding legislation that controls the sensitive exports. Let me also say this commission is modeled after the Helsinki Commission. It was successful. A number of us worked with it when it was impacting rights in the Soviet Union. It was a constant pressure point, as this commission will be. It will add external pressure to the internal pressures. There have been reports in recent days in the paper of dissidents in China, and here is what they say: A broad array of dissidents, environmentalists, and labor activists in China appear united in their support of Congressional passage of the permanent normal trade relations act with this commission and that this combines external pressure with internal.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentlewoman will continue to yield, quickly, the permanent staff can be stationed here. It can be stationed in China. Let me say a word about the surge provision, the toughest antisurge provision in American law. If there is an inflow of products from China that would hurt American workers and producers, workers and producers can file a complaint, swift action with the standard of causation, which will allow us to act if there is this surge.

Mr. LEVIN. I yield to the gentleman from Nebraska.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, it is my privilege to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Eshoo).

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps).

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, trade issues are never easy. They become more difficult as globalization has become global. It now includes the largest nation in the world. It is destined, according to World Bank estimates, to have the second largest national economy in the world in 20 years. So China's integration into the world trading system inevitably presents both opportunities and challenges both. What we have to do is to take advantage of the benefits in the agreement that we negotiated with China and also actively address the problems in our relationship. Briefly, the benefits, and there will be more discussion of this, the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Archer), chairman of the committee, has laid out some of them. Lower tariffs, dramatically lower tariffs over time for both agricultural and industrial products. Service, a dramatic breakthrough for our service industries. Telecommunications, China is exploding in terms of telecommunications. So vital barriers that now exist, for example, local content requirements, they are out the window under this agreement. Restrictions on distribution of our products made in the United States, they are gone over time under this agreement. Technology transfers that were required by China up to this point would no longer be available to the Chinese. The point is clear: if we do not grant PNTR to China, it is going into the WTO in any event. In any event. The U.S. has no veto power over their entry. And if we do not grant PNTR, most of the benefits that we negotiated with the Chinese Government will not be available to us but they will be to our competitors. There has been some talk these months about the 1979 agreement between the U.S. and China giving us all of the benefits that we have since negotiated. I have read the documents many times, and that is simply incorrect. But I want to focus right now on the challenges, because there are challenges as well as opportunities. One of them is the issue of compliance. There is weak rule of law today in China. How are we going to make sure that China complies with its agreements? The gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Bereuter) and I have put together legislation to address this challenge as well as others, and there are some meaningful compliance provisions in our proposal. One relates to the USTR review, an annual review within our own ranks, detailed, meaningful. Perhaps it is important granting resources to our agencies China specific, China specific, to enforce their agreement. And also there is, in essence, an instruction to our USTR that in the protocol discussions that will ensue now that the EU has reached agreement with China, that she will insist, she will work actively for an annual review within the WTO of the agreement by China. That is the first aspect in terms of the challenge. The second one relates to the potential surges in products from China. It is going to compete with us. That is what trade is. It is competition. And there could be harmful surges from China into the U.S. that would hurt our workers and hurt our producers. I will not go into detail now, but I can say, as someone who has worked on these issues now for 15 years and fought to keep the antidumping provisions in U.S. law in the Uruguay Round, and successfully, with the help of the gentleman from New York (Mr. Houghton), this provision, this specific provision as to surges from China and handling them, is the strongest anti-surge provision that will be in U.S. law. Third relates to human rights, including international core labor standards in the U.S. law. First of all, in the legislation that the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Bereuter) and I have proposed and will be before us tomorrow, what we do is to set up a task force, and a meaningful one, to pull together the agencies of the U.S. Government to work with Customs to make sure that our law on forced and prison labor products from China, that that law is implemented. And then the commission that we have proposed; high level, at the executive-congressional level, full time, fully staffed, patterned after the Helsinki Commission, 25 years old. That commission was effective in Eastern Europe. This commission that we have put together on paper, if we work at it, will be effective in reality. There will be nine Members from the House, nine from the Senate, five from the executive at the highest levels. We will represent the majority on that commission. The Helsinki Commission worked and this can work. It will work because we will be determined to make it work. So, the provisions that the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Bereuter) and others and I have worked on combines PNTR with this framework, with this plan of action that is the most promising approach to take advantage of the opportunities and to meet the challenges. It allows us to both engage China and to confront. It recognizes the internal forces for change in China and reinforces them with external pressures by us. I want to refer briefly, as I close, to two comments in recent articles, one by Dai Qing, who is perhaps China's most prominent environmentalist and independent political thinker, and here is what he said recently in a report in The Washington Post. In quotes. ``There is a battle here between opening to the West and closing to the West. This fight is not over. One of the main economic and political problems in China today is our monopoly system, a monopoly on power and business monopolies. Both elements are mutually reinforcing. The WTO's rules would naturally encourage competition and that's bad for both monopolies.'' And then an article just this last Sunday in The New York Times. This is a report, not an editorial, and it is entitled ``Chinese See U.S. Trade Bill as Vital to Future Reforms.'' And after quoting a large number of people in China, including one who recently lost his job as a reformer, this is what all of them in this article say. ``Chinese say their country is at a tipping point in its history. A yes vote on normal trade can propel it forward to greater liberalization and engagement with the West. A no vote from Congress will be seen as a slap in the face, throwing China back into conservatism and anti- American hatred.'' Rejecting PNTR now that it has been combined with the proposals in our legislation would likely be a catalyst not for change but for chaos in the relationships between the U.S. and China. It would make both active engagement and constructive confrontation by the U.S. much more difficult. There is a better course, colleagues, in this distinguished body at this distinguished moment. It is passage of PNTR, now combined with a framework, with a plan of action, with a strategy to assess the advantages and address the problems. I was in China 10 days in January, in Beijing and then Hong Kong. After talking to students, after talking to intellectuals, to artists, as well as government officials, I came to the conclusion indelibly that change in China is irreversible but its direction is not inevitable. We must be activists in this process of change. We, the United States, cannot isolate China and its 1.2 billion people; and we must not isolate ourselves from impacting on China's future direction. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. LaFalce). (Mr. LaFALCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran).

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes and 10 seconds to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind). (Mr. KIND asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Tanner). (Mr. TANNER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of the time. Mr. Chairman, the annual review process has been, basically, a failure. We need both to gain the benefits from what we negotiated and find a better way to impact China. The Helsinki Commission worked not because the USSR agreed; but because we, the U.S., persevered. If we persevere with the provisions in the bill that the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Bereuter) and I and many others have put together, the best interests of our workers and our producers will prevail.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, it is my pleasure to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton), the very distinguished senior Member and expert on security issues.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I support most of the provisions of the Defense Authorization Act; at the same time, I have grave concerns about the Kasich amendment that the House adopted yesterday. In my judgement, the Kasich amendment does serious harm to U.S. policy in Kosovo. If possible, this amendment is even more misguided than a similar proposal the House rejected earlier this year when we debated the Supplemental Appropriation. The Kasich amendment conditions U.S. participation in Kosovo on whether or not our European allies meet a specified percentage of their aid pledges. All of these so-called burdensharing amendments contain the same fundamental flaw: They seek to abdicate control of U.S. policy in Kosovo to Europe. If the Kasich amendment becomes the law of the land, the decision on whether U.S. forces remain in Kosovo will not be made on the basis of whether doing so is in the best interest of our national security. Instead, the decision will be put on automatic pilot on the basis of what Europe does. I know some Members of the House honestly disagree with U.S. policy in Kosovo. They feel we should not be there. I disagree with them, but if that's the way they feel, let's debate U.S. participation in Kosovo directly and have an up-or-down vote. Don't try to dress this up as a burdensharing amendment. The fact of the matter is that Europe is already providing 80 percent of the 46,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania. There is no legitimate burdensharing argument that would dictate the withdrawal of U.S forces from Kosovo. I agree with NATO Secretary-General Robinson who recently wrote that an American withdrawal from Kosovo ``risks sending a dangerous signal to the Yugoslav dictator--Slobodan Milosevic--that NATO is divided, and that its biggest and most important ally is pulling up stakes.'' Having prevailed in Operation Allied Force, we should not now hand Milosevic the victory he could not win on the battlefield. The Kasich amendment would undermine peace in Kosovo and jeopardize the relationship between the United States and our NATO allies. While I will vote for the Defense Authorization today, I do with the expectation that the Kasich language will be modified in conference with the Senate.