Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I get to the point, and I don't make it in any hostile manner. I just say the complexities of the world, just that part of it, are very considerable. I am reluctant to see such categories enter trade law. No one has ever asked whether the products of the American clothing workshops in New York City were made by American citizens. There surely would have been a time when the majority--or many of them--were not American citizens at all. They would have come from what would become Poland, and there was no concept of citizenship for the occupants of the shtetls. I just suggest there is considerable ambiguity. I don't wish to press the matter. I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. If you are on the Indian Ocean, how sure are you that you are in Africa?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I am aware of that, and I recognize that is a very reasonable thought. But I do know, from some experience in that part of the world, that citizenship is not a standard statutory entitlement of the individual, as it would be--well, even in our country, if you come here, you have to go through a great deal to become a citizen. If you are born here, you already are. That can be a very ambiguous situation, sir. I don't know. May I ask my friend, are Mauritians Africans or Indians? One of the big issues, I can say to the Presiding Officer, is that in Mauritius a considerable textile trade has developed with Mauritian sponsors and Chinese migrant workers. Are Mauritians Africans?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 2483

Mr. MOYNIHAN. There may have been a time--yes, there was, in the era of a planned economy, in the era of the Soviet Union, in another era. Are we debating another era? We are going to ask the President, under one of these amendments--I have lost track which one--to negotiate 147 reciprocal trade treaties-- 147--and then, sir, in one of them--I will not say which, because I do not think it would be quite fair--but in one of them, for the third act of imported children's wear, that somehow involves textiles made in the Far East or wherever, the violation is punishable by a fine of $1 million and 5 years in prison. Do we send people to prison for the mislabeling of cotton goods? I mean, heavens, a little balance, a little perspective. We are talking about marginal producers on the margin of the world economy, trying to give them a hand. In the case of the Caribbean Basin Initiative, we are trying to do what President Reagan said was only fair and balanced: If we were going to have the North American Free Trade Agreement, it should not close out Central America and the Caribbean. I hope we will proceed as long as we have to with such amendments, but I hope some perspective will be in order.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I join my chairman in saying this is a valuable amendment. Having been involved in drafting the legislation in 1962 which created the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act, I think this is an important extension of the same principle. It is altogether agreeable to this Senator. I hope there will be no objection.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I am happy to.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. They spend their time sending us delegations.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Thank me?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I don't wish to suggest there is anything but good intentions behind all these measures. But to introduce the idea of--is it citizenship we are talking about, ancestry, or what? What is an African, sir? South Africa would be part of the arrangements in this African Growth Act. Suppose there was a plant in Johannesburg that was owned by the descendants of Dutch settlers who arrived in the 17th century; some of the managers were Indian persons who had emigrated in the 19th century under the British Empire--under the British Empire, people moved all over the world. We recently had the great honor of meeting, just off the Senate Chamber, with heads of state from the Caribbean area, and the President of Trinidad and Tobago is of Indian ancestry. That is very normal. Indians moved to California, having gone to the British Empire and gone to Canada and were coming down. And suppose there were Zulu workers there--African, obviously, but they are more recent arrivals than most.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, we do not have order. We cannot hear the Senator from South Carolina.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Yes.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I think he did.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Yes. May I ask how much time the Senators from Iowa and North Dakota wish?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. May I first congratulate the Chair for having recapitulated this agreement.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I would like to associate myself with the chairman and note that this measure, among other things, provides for up to 5 years imprisonment for a third dispute. We don't want to criminalize international trade.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of this technical, yet necessary, legislation, the Child Support Miscellaneous Amendments of 1999. We live in a nation with an ever-increasing number of single mothers. About one-third (32.8%) of all children born in the United States last year were born outside of marriage. At a minimum, we need a comprehensive and effective child support system to see to it that non-custodial parents--often fathers--provide for these children. Maintaining a central unit for disbursing and collecting child support payments in each state is essential. This eases the burden on the business community, whose cooperation we need. Unfortunately, a handful of states appear to have missed the statutory deadline for having such a central unit in operation. Under current law, all Federal funding for the child support programs in these states will be withdrawn. This is too harsh of a penalty. States are missing the deadline because they are simply behind schedule in their procurement effort or because of a broader failing in the computer systems undergirding their child support programs. This legislation would provide an alternative, more modest, financial penalty for those states which are late in meeting the deadline. For those states suffering a general failure of their child support computer systems it would not impose a penalty because those states have already been penalized. I thank the Chairman for his work on this matter, simple one of reasonable program administration.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Yes, sir, and that it becomes clear to our friends around the world, as you say, and our friends downtown--give them heart; give them something to show.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank the chairman.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Sure.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I wish to join most emphatically with my revered chairman in congratulating the Senate today, in thanking the majority and minority leaders. We have risen to a moment which was ominously in doubt. Last week, as the week progressed, two things took place: One, on the Senate floor, as we now have established, we had 74 votes just to proceed with the bill--we will have more when this is done. Even so, we found ourselves in a procedural tangle not unknown to the body which was thwarting the will of an emphatic majority--and not just a majority for this legislation but a majority for a tradition of openness in trade that began 65 years ago with the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 at the depths of the Depression, the aftermath of the Smoot- Hawley legislation, with our system of government very much under challenge. That challenge would grow more fierce and would end in the great World War. We were then, even so, confident enough of the promise of trade that we could go forward in this matter. We have been going forward for 60 years. However, 5 years ago we stopped. The President did obtain the approval of the Congress for the World Trade Organization. I shouldn't put it that the President ``obtained'' the approval of the Congress; Congress approved what Congress had sent our negotiators to obtain. There was a little side ripple there. An international trade organization was to have been one of the main institutions of the Bretton Woods system created in 1944. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development--we call it the World Bank--the International Monetary Fund were created; the International Trade Organization didn't happen. Finally, we caught up with ourselves and we created the World Trade Organization which I believe now has 134 members with 30 observers currently applying for membership. I said there were two ominous, even menacing moments. The second was that there was almost no attention paid in the press and media to this week-long frustrating, seemingly unavailing effort. We have been on this a week and we got nowhere. No one noticed. It is as if no one cared. We woke up. Yesterday, the Washington Post in a lead editorial on this subject noted neither the administration nor the Congress had done anything they needed to do, and that at the end of this month the World Trade Organization will meet in Seattle. Our Ambassador, our Trade Representative, Ambassador Barshefsky, will open the meeting. Our President will be there, along with heads of state. We will be talking about the next round of global trade negotiations. They can take 9, 10 years. They are fundamentally important. But our President will not have the authority to enter these negotiations--or rather to send the resulting agreements to the Congress for expedited consideration. If he were to have had the sub- Saharan African legislation fail and the Caribbean initiative of President Reagan fail; if we were to have, in effect, allowed the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, President Kennedy's measure that led to the Kennedy Round, like the Uruguay Round, expire and say to the 200,000 American families who are displaced by trade, as others are, that we should let economic forces work their way and tell them, that's too bad; if we allowed the Generalized System of Preferences to expire and say, no matter, how would our representatives look? What would they say? What could they undertake? Very little. It would be a moment in trade that would be shameful, after 65 years of bringing the world out of the depths of the Great Depression, now, in the longest economic expansion in the United States, the longest economic expansion in history. For so many years we talked about ``the longest peacetime expansion.'' No, no, this expansion is greater even than that from World War II. This is what trade has brought us. Not just trade, but without trade expansion we could not have had this economic expansion. Now, at least, we can go to Seattle and say: Here are our bona fides. We are still players. We still want to go forward. So, Mr. President, let the games begin. We have a long debate before us. It will be a bipartisan debate. The Senator from Delaware, the chairman of our committee, will be leading the debate. His deputy, if I may so deputize myself, will be at his side across the aisle. Let us now proceed, being of good heart and great expectations. I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I certainly could attempt to do so. I would not risk overstatement. There would be a setting in which, having given the President negotiating authority for a new round of international trade talks, having arranged for Trade Adjustment Assistance to be continued as it has been for 37 years, we could say: The particular matters before us will be part of the trade negotiations--and so forth. We could say we will get to it next year. But we don't have that negotiating authority. The President goes to Seattle emptyhanded. The only thing he can bring with him is the trade legislation we have before us--which we still have to take to the House. But this is all the United States can show the world, the world which has been following us for all these years. So I hope, at a very minimum, the sense of tradition--even, if I may say, of honor--will drive us forward in this matter.