Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I particularly want to draw attention to several organizations that played a leading role, and I apologize to others that were also very involved. The Human Rights Campaign played a central role in organizing today's introduction. I also thank the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Council of La Raza, the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, the National Women's Law Center, and so many others. The Equality Act will create uniform Federal standards to protect all LGBT Americans from discrimination in housing, in workplaces, in schools, in public accommodations, and in financial transactions. It is a vision of equality deeply rooted in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It is setting the same foundation to end discrimination for the LGBT community that was set for ethnicity and set for gender and set for race. That is the foundation for the vision of eliminating discrimination in area after area, and it is time we place LGBT nondiscrimination on that same foundation. That is what we are doing today--comprehensively taking on discrimination. The bill also addresses gaps in legal protections against sex discrimination--ensuring women are treated equally in all aspects of their lives. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a steadily increasing number of courts have recognized that sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination are properly understood as forms of sex discrimination in light of multiple controlling sex discrimination cases. The EEOC has done this through several decisions, most notably Macy v. Holder in 2012, which held that transgender discrimination is sex discrimination, and Baldwin v. Foxx very recently, which held that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination. The bill we are introducing today, the Equality Act, codifies this understanding, making it clear that sexual orientation and gender identity are correctly understood as sex discrimination. In addition, the bill adds the terms ``sexual orientation'' and ``gender identity'' to the list of protected characteristics throughout the code. This change should not be read to mean that sexual orientation and gender identity are not correctly understood as sex discrimination. These additions were made so covered entities as well as LGBT people can clearly see that these protections exist. Employers, businesses, and institutions are often not aware of the decisions by the EEOC and the courts holding that sexual orientation or gender identity are protected. This bill represents a paradigm shift in two ways. First, our civil rights community has worked incredibly hard to defend the principles established in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and today we are asking for their engagement to not simply defend this act but to expand this act. Second, we have worked very hard to take on pieces of discrimination, whether it be don't ask, don't tell, whether it be Federal benefits for same-sex partners. But today we are saying we need a vision of comprehensive nondiscrimination. That is the expression of full opportunity. You cannot access full opportunity if the door is closed in financial transactions or jury selection or public accommodations if you can still be turned away from a restaurant because of whom you love or whom you are. Every American deserves equality in every basic function of our society. Discrimination has no place in our Nation's laws. If it is wrong in marriage, as the Court has held, as numerous States have established, it is wrong also in employment. If it is wrong in employment, it is wrong in housing. If it is wrong in housing, it is wrong, too, in education. Overwhelmingly, Americans believe discrimination is wrong. Overwhelmingly, they believe it is already illegal, and they believe it has no place in our society and no place being condoned by our laws. Even though the Equality Act addresses multiple dimensions of discrimination, it is quite simple. It says that people deserve to live free from fear, free from violence, and free from discrimination, regardless of who they are or whom they love. Writing these protections into law will bring us another stride forward in our Nation's long march toward inclusion and equality. It will extend the full promise of America to every American. I will keep fighting until this bill is on the President's desk. I will not be satisfied until everyone in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community is guaranteed the dignity and the freedom they deserve, the whole sense of opportunity provided through participation in American society. A full measure of equality: equal citizen. I urge all of my colleagues to join me in this fight. I thank the 40 Senators who stood up today to be original cosponsors of the Equality Act of 2015. Let's make our democracy more inclusive and our freedom more perfect by bringing our laws and our actions in line with the founding principle that all are created equal.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I appreciate the leadership of my colleague from Ohio, who has brought such a focus on ending predatory activities, helping our financial system work for working Americans. Indeed, that is certainly what all of our effort is about on the fifth anniversary of the Wall Street reform bill, the Dodd-Frank bill. My colleague was talking about the Humble Home mortgage, which was turned into a predatory instrument that instead of building the wealth of the middle class of America was designed to strip that wealth. There was the two-year teaser rates in which interest rates would go from 4 percent to 9 percent, more than doubling. Liar loan underwritings, in which the loan is way too large for a family, were given to a family just to reap the immediate benefits on behalf of the mortgage broker: the immediate commissions, steering payments and kickbacks that were paid to mortgage originators to steer their clients from the prime loan they qualified for into the subprime loan. Now, thankfully, as the Senator from Ohio outlined, we have ended those predatory practices and we must not let those practices return. Homeownership has been the foundation for middle-class wealth-- homeownership, education, and good-paying jobs. We cannot take away homeownership as a significant part of the American dream, the dream to control your own space, the king or queen of your own castle, and certainly to build the equity that puts your family on a strong financial foundation. Wall Street added to this particular story because they took these predatory teaser rate loans and put them into securities. One can think about securities as a box full of mortgages. Those mortgages generate a certain cashflow, and you sell the cashflow. That is what a security is. So these securities were only as strong as the mortgages that were in the security box, and those mortgages were deeply flawed. When the interest rate went from 4 percent to 9 percent, a family's payments doubled. They weren't able to make their payments because the underwriting had been inappropriate from the beginning, and they weren't able to get out of the loan because there was a prepayment penalty if they tried to get out of the loan. That was a steel trap that locked families into these inflated interest rates and eventually destroyed their finances. So we ended all that. Think about what Wall Street did. They took these mortgages and set up a securities waterfall--AAA, AA, and so forth. They got ratings on these securities as if these home loans were the same sound, good home loans of the past, not these new steering payment, prepayment penalty teaser-rate loans that had started to become so common and such a different instrument. Wall Street said we will make a lot of money selling these securities. Indeed, there were a couple other factors that came into play. Not only did credit agencies give them great ratings despite the underlying flaws, but there was also insurance that could be bought to protect the security in case it would fail. It was called a credit default swap or CDS. For a few cents you could buy insurance to make sure the security was good. Of course, insurance is only as strong as the insurance company behind it, and the purchasers didn't know the details of that because it went through the middlemen in Wall Street. It turned out that AIG, the American Insurance Group, was issuing this insurance in vast quantities, not doing what an insurance group normally does, which is set aside reserves to cover potential losses. Indeed, they were just on a short-term upward--hey, we can sell these insurance policies called CDS or credit default swaps for a ton of money for short-term profits and long-term irresponsibility. So let's fast-forward from 2003, when the predatory loans came into popularity, and now we are in 2008 and mortgages are starting to fail, the securities are starting to fail, and then of course the insurance on those securities failed. Meanwhile, you have investment houses. For example, Lehman Brothers in 1998 had $28 billion in proprietary holdings, and by 2006 that had expanded to $313 billion against a capital base of just $18 billion in common equity. Think of that leverage--$313 billion in holdings and a base of $18 billion. That enormous leverage meant that if there was just a slight decline in the value of the products they were holding, then the whole firm was going to come tumbling down. Because these securities started to fail, they didn't have just a slight decline, they had a big decline. Suddenly, you have a major investment house, Lehman Brothers, out of business. That sent shock waves through our entire financial enterprise because a lot of the financing--short-term financing--was done through 24-hour financial transactions called repurchase agreements or repo agreements. Repurchase agreements--you sell an asset for 24 hours, you get the money, you buy it back 24 hours later, and then you resell it. That means every 24 hours you have to come up with the cash to buy back this repo financing. When the underlying value started to go down, the company couldn't come up with the funds to execute the repurchase agreements, so they had to do a fire sale of their assets. Well, if they do a fire sale of their assets, that means for every other company that has similar products, the value of their products now goes down the tube overnight, and then they have problems. So you have a domino effect--a contagion that spreads through the financial industry. Let's trace this back in simple circumstances. You had healthy homeowner loans, fully amortizing fair loans replaced by predatory teaser-rate loans leading to securities based on these faulty predatory mortgages. These securities became a major financial instrument. That financial instrument collapsed when the mortgages collapsed. There was a domino effect, a contagion that brought down our entire financial house. The American worker was on the losing end of this house of cards. American workers lost their jobs. American workers lost their retirement savings. These American workers often lost their homes because after losing their jobs, they couldn't pay for their home or because the teaser-rate mortgage doubled in monthly payments, they couldn't make those monthly payments. That type of destruction in which Wall Street casinos fared so well and American workers were so destroyed must not happen again. That is what the Wall Street reform bill is all about. On the fifth anniversary, we have ended through the Volcker rule the proprietary trading that was basically large hedge funds embodied within banks being essentially done on the backs of Federal deposit insurance; that is, the government was insuring the banks that were engaging in these highly leveraged hedge fund operations. That is just wrong. If you want to operate a hedge fund, absolutely, get your investors, place your bets, and if you go down, the investors go down, but the banking system doesn't go down. We must not allow these highly leveraged hedge funds to be operating inside of our core banking system. The phrase that was often used as we were working on this 5 years ago was ``Let's make banking boring again.'' Take deposits, make loans, and through those loans fuel the success of our families and our businesses. But if you want to be a high-risk investor, do it somewhere else. That is the core story about shutting down the Wall Street casino. This is the Wall Street casino before the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill: Sorry, we are closed; afterwards: Well, I am not sorry they are closed because we have rebuilt a financial system designed to work for working Americans, and that is a good thing. I look forward to turning this over to my colleague from Delaware.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Lisa Smith, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

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

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise to address an amendment I am proposing to the bill, the Every Child Achieves Act. I am not going to ask to call up the amendment at this time, but I certainly would like to do so at a later point in the day. I hope this amendment will be part of any effort to wrap-up debate on this bill because it addresses an important component that is being left out of discussion on the Every Child Achieves Act. The Every Child Achieves Act is the authorization act, but it leaves out the vision for school policy. This is a bipartisan bill. It is a bill that would give a lot more flexibility to our States, and it has been an important effort to address many shortcomings in the former act, the No Child Left Behind Act, that in fact left a lot of children behind. In my discussions with educators throughout the State of Oregon, with parents, administrators, and teachers, they found a great number of difficulties and problems with an act that was undermining the success of our public schools, leaving a huge number of children behind, and focusing on what these educators referred to as ``the bubble''--that is, those children who are close enough to the testing line to get them over the top, while decreasing attention paid to those children who could already meet the testing line or those they think were not able to get to that line. That is not a holistic, comprehensive education system addressing the needs of all our children. So I am delighted to see this reform on the floor of the Senate. The focus on assisting every child in achieving is appropriate. But we cannot achieve a world-class education system that responds to a world knowledge economy, preparing our children to be fully successful members of that world knowledge economy, if we do not provide the resources necessary for our schools to thrive. It strikes me as a real failure of our legislative process that a generation after I went through elementary and secondary education, we are a far richer nation, but our schools have far fewer resources. My children have been attending public schools in the same blue- collar school district I grew up in. I have a firsthand view of the difference between what the school provided when I was there and what has been provided while my children are there. The short conclusion is that our classrooms are more crowded and our schools are unable to provide the same range of options that benefited my generation. How is it that we are a much richer nation, but we are undervaluing and underfunding our elementary and secondary education system in this Nation? Well, we can tie that back to a lot that has transpired, including a huge growth in inequality in our Nation. But here is the key point: While we sit here on the floor debating better education policy, shouldn't we also be recognizing explicitly this huge failure to provide basic resources to the elementary and secondary education system? The funding cuts that are currently anticipated under the sequester would bring Federal investments and programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to their lowest levels since fiscal year 2002. Let me repeat that: the lowest level since fiscal year 2002. Of the lowest achieving 5 percent of schools that receive funds under part A of title I of such act, about two-thirds of students are not meeting their grade-level standards. It is certainly a more difficult task for teachers to enable students to meet those standards when our classrooms are more crowded. The proposed appropriations act cuts funding for part A of title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by $850 million as compared to the President's budget and the Democratic funding alternative.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, research shows that high-quality early education is critical to the educational development of every child. There, too, we are underfunding the effort. The proposed appropriations act provides no funding for preschool development grants and a cut of $750 million as compared to the President's budget and the Democratic alternative. Now, this is happening--this underfunding of education--within the construct known as the sequester. The sequester was partially alleviated 2 years ago by a budget deal known as Ryan-Murray. That Ryan-Murray agreement led to saying that according to the sequester principle defense spending and nondefense spending would be treated equally. If one is capped, the other is capped. If one is raised, the other is raised. That fundamental understanding led to an improvement over the last 2 years. But that improvement is gone. So at the very moment, we are talking about better education policy, and we are talking about worse education funding. That is simply wrong--wrong for our children, wrong for the next generation and the success of America. So let's embrace that second half of the conversation and through my amendment-- amendment No. 2203--call for an intense negotiation to occur, essentially to restore appropriate funding on the nondefense programs. This is a rational counterpart to the debate over the bill that we have before us right now. It is certainly important for America to recognize that you cannot, on the one hand, call for better education policy and on the other hand devastate the funding for early childhood education and devastate the funding for K-12 education and feel like you have done something to make American education work better, because you have not. If you have underfunded education, you have undervalued our children, and you have undermined the future success of our Nation. I hope that amendment No. 2203, which calls upon the House and Senate to come together and address this failure of funding, will be a significant part of our conversation as we work to wrap up debate on the Every Child Achieves Act. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to extend the time allotted to complete my statement.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, in just a short period of time here in the Senate Chamber we will be voting on fast-track legislation designed to create a very quick path through the Senate for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and for trade agreements to come thereafter. So I rise now to share with my colleagues and to share with the American people my concerns about this course of action. It is President Kennedy who once said: ``The trade of a nation expresses, in a very concrete way, its aims and aspirations.'' What are our aims and aspirations in the context of this trade agreement and fast-track? From my perspective, the thing that really matters is whether this trade agreement will create good-paying jobs or will destroy good- paying jobs. Will this trade agreement make the American economy work better for working Americans? I feel it fails the test. I am going to explain why. Now, it is true that the trade agreement is complex. It is multidimensional. It has a dimension that deals with intellectual property, with the extension of copyrights and patents and protections for trade secrets. That is certainly a win for protecting an innovation economy and innovation by Americans and American companies. It has an agricultural section. We have sought out an analysis of the agricultural section, but don't have one yet. But those in the know say there is a good chance that the tariffs that are struck down and the nontariff barriers that are struck down as barriers to U.S. products may on balance benefit the U.S. agricultural economy. I look forward to an analysis to really examine that in detail. But the heart of the trade agreement is about manufacturing. We have multinational companies that are seeking to be able to make things at the lowest possible cost. That is the heart of this trade agreement, as with other trade agreements. That means being able to incorporate into an economic circle countries where the costs are very low to make things. That is certainly the case with this trade agreement. This trade agreement includes a couple of countries that have no minimum wage and others that have a very low minimum wage. We are really talking about Vietnam, Malaysia, and Mexico. In Vietnam they have a regional minimum wage. So it varies from place to place. You hear different amounts, but roughly it is 60 to 75 cents per hour. In Malaysia it is $1.54. In Mexico it is 66 cents. Well, those are all incredibly low compared to the American minimum wage of $7.25. Of course, many of our States have State minimum wages that are higher. But the minimum wage is only a part of the puzzle. When you include the cost of labor in the United States, you have to include such things as workers' compensation and set aside expenses for Social Security and disability insurance and the cost of maintaining safe working standards, which are rigorously enforced. So when you compare all of that, you probably have a labor ratio that is on the order of about 20 to 1. That is a playing field tilted against the American worker at a 20-to-1 ratio for manufacturing. That is certainly not a level playing field. Our companies will say time and again: Here in America, we will thrive with anyone in the world on a level playing field. But when the costs are 20 to 1--that is, when the costs overseas in countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Mexico are lower than in the United States on a 20-to-1 ratio--that is a playing field steeply tilted against the United States. So it is no wonder that in previous agreements we have seen an increase in trade deficits and a big loss of jobs here in the United States of America. Let's take a look at three of those cases. In 1993, we signed the North America Free Trade Agreement. That incorporated Mexico into our economic circle. So let's compare the trade deficit in 1992, a year before, with 2014. In the course of those years, the trade deficit increased from $5.3 billion to $53.8 billion. That is a massive, massive change. Now, by various estimates that translates into a job loss of between 480,000 to 680,000 jobs. So half a million Americans lost good-paying jobs as a result of NAFTA. Let's take a look at China. China came into the World Trade Organization, or WTO, in the year 2000. So let's compare 1999 with 2014. The trade deficit went from $68.7 billion to $343 billion. That is an increase of one-quarter of a trillion dollars. That is not a collective amount. That is an annual amount. By various estimates that resulted in job losses of between 2.7 million and 3.2 million American jobs. Or let's look at South Korea. Remember how folks said that this would facilitate so much access to consumers in South Korea, and it would not have a big impact on our trade deficit? The South Korea agreement was signed in 2011 or ratified. So comparing 2010 to 2014--just 4 years-- the trade deficit ballooned. It ballooned from $10 billion to $25 billion. The resulting job losses are estimated to have been between 75,000 and 150,000 jobs. Now, when I say jobs, maybe that is abstract. So let's translate this to families. Between the low estimates and the high estimates, we are talking about 3.3 to 4 million American families losing their jobs--good-paying manufacturing jobs. You know, there is no better foundation for a family than a good-paying job. So when we pull away that foundation by striking agreements that send our jobs overseas, that is utterly devastating to families across our Nation and certainly to families in my home State of Oregon and certainly to families in every single State. So you cannot be pro- family and also be for shipping our good-paying jobs overseas. There is no government program that substitutes for a good-paying job. That is why I am so deeply disturbed about the outline of the agreement that we are undertaking. Each and every time that improvements to wages here in the U.S. come up, the makers will say: If you raise your wages, if you add family vacation or family leave or sick leave or medical leave or help with daycare for your children--you know what--we may just have to move our manufacturing overseas or we may have to move our supply chain overseas or we may have to produce less at the factory here and more at the factory overseas. It does not stop there. The construction that is envisioned by our multinational manufacturers in pursuit of their low-cost production is not just to play off the United States against Malaysia or the United States against Mexico or the United States against Vietnam--although all of that will happen--it is also to play off each of those low-cost countries against each of them. So they can say to China, which has a certain cost structure and is not yet envisioned to be part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership but does benefit from WTO access: China, your costs are going up. Oh, you are enforcing those environmental laws, and your costs are going up. Oh, you are adding health standards, labor standards, and your costs are going up. You are paying overtime, and your costs are going up. We are going to shift more of our manufacturing to Malaysia, and if you keep at it, we will shift all of it. Or to Malaysia: You are just close by to Vietnam. Your costs go up, and we are going to ship more to Vietnam. Or to Vietnam: You raise your standards, you raise your costs, you raise your pay, and you raise your standard of living. So we are going to move those jobs to Mexico. This is tremendous leverage if you are an owner of a multinational, if you own stock in a multinational, if you are an investor in a multinational, because you can sell--you can produce your product at lower costs by playing off economy against economy--at the world market price and you make more money. But if you are a worker in the United States who is being played against a worker in Vietnam, it is a bad deal. If you are a worker in Vietnam being played off against a worker in Malaysia, it is a bad deal. That is not all that is wrong with this arrangement. Let's look at the various things that could have made fast-track stronger and that are not in fast-track. We have heard a lot of conversation and a lot of presentation that this is a gold-standard framework, that this is a new style of trade agreement. But the fact is that key provisions that could have made it a gold standard or a new strategy are not there. Let's start with the fact that there is no minimum wage required in this agreement--not even a minimum wage of $1 an hour, which would have certainly affected Mexico or Vietnam--and no mechanism for where there is a minimum wage, to increase it gradually over time to help lift up workers in our poorest nations and to reduce the gap and level out the playing field between low-wage countries and high-wage countries such as the United States. Second, the agreement does not address currency manipulation. Everyone in international trade understands that tariffs can be replaced by a pseudo-tariff through currency manipulation, through intervention in the currency market. In 2009, when I came to the Senate, our Congress estimated that the currency manipulation by China amounted to a 25-percent tariff on American products and a 25-percent subsidy to Chinese products. Why would we agree to an arrangement where currency manipulation can produce a tariff against our products and a subsidy to our competitors within that framework? Third, we have had a problem with the loss of our sovereignty on health issues, environmental issues, and consumer issues by giving that sovereignty away and that decisionmaking away to an international panel. Just weeks ago, under the World Trade Organization structure-- the WTO structure--we lost a case, and the outcome of that case was that here in America we are not allowed to label our meat ``Produced in America.'' That is a loss of our sovereignty. I want to live in an America where if our consumers, if our policymakers, if our legislators believe it is in the best interest of this Nation for our consumers to be able to know where their meat is raised, if our consumers want to exercise some patriotic decisionmaking and support American ranchers, they ought to be able to do so. We ought to be able to have that law and not give away our lawmaking authority to an international panel. So this is an investor-state dispute settlement panel of three corporate lawyers, who can be advocates in one case and the judges in the next. It does not provide anything close to an appropriate mechanism to decide issues of health, safety, and the environment. We could have taken those off the table so that if we wanted to control a dangerous environmental toxin such as cancer-causing flame retardants in our carpets, we could do so without going afoul of trade agreements. But there was no effort to protect our health and safety here in America in this trade agreement. If we really believed that we were going to have a new-order agreement, we would have an enforcement mechanism for labor standards and for environmental standards. We have heard folks talk on the floor that there are such new enforcement standards. So I am aggrieved to report to you that that is simply not the case. Now, let's start with the fact that we could have required the passage of laws before countries are admitted into the trade agreement and required that they bring their environmental standards, their legal standards, and their labor standards up to snuff before admission and then show that they were actually implementing them and have a 2-year demonstration period to show that they were actually enforcing them. Because that is the easiest point at which to bring nations accountable before they are members of the trade agreement, before they get the lower tariffs. That is the point you have incentive. That is the point you have leverage. But there was no effort to force countries, to require countries to meet those minimum standards before being admitted into this trade agreement. We could have had some form of snapback provision that said: If you fail in bringing your laws into accordance on the environmental side or the labor side, if you fail to enforce your laws, then tariffs snap back. But there is no snapback provision in this agreement. We could have expanded the dumping provisions in international law to give a way to take on situations where countries are producing at low cost because they are not abiding by the goals in the environmental or the labor area, but there is no such provision envisioned or required in fast-track or anticipated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In the course of our trade agreements, there has been only one situation where we challenged labor laws, and it was with Guatemala. We challenged them 7 years ago, and to date that case has never been adjudicated. It is virtually impossible, after a country has failed to come up to standards, to go back and retroactively enforce those standards without some new mechanism, some new strategy. But there is no new mechanism or strategy that applies in this situation, nothing that would solve the Guatamala case and actually end with it being adjudicated. To continue with the challenges to this fast-track, the failures of this fast-track, there is nothing in this that provides for Congress to be consulted when other nations dock; that is, tie on to the framework that will exist in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We had an amendment here on the floor that if China was to try to dock with the TPP and become a TPP fully privileged member, it would have to come back to the United States for consideration. That would give us a chance to look at China's currency manipulation or China's cheating on international intellectual property. That would give us a chance to examine a whole facet of things. But no requirement like that exists. To add on to everything else, now, because of the way this process has proceeded, there is no guarantee that there will be trade adjustment assistance for families who lose their jobs when their jobs go overseas, no assistance in training. I find it absurd that the same folks who say that there will be virtually no jobs lost proceed to say that the cost of compensating families by giving some minimal training to them when they lose their jobs will be vastly expensive and that America can't afford it. So on the one hand they say there will be no jobs lost. On the other hand they say that so many jobs will be lost that it will be too expensive for our Nation to afford. So they are OK with leaving American families not only stranded without jobs but stranded with no training to try to find new jobs in the economy. If we go back to where I started with President Kennedy and his vision that the trade of a nation expresses in a concrete way its aims and aspirations, our aim should be to create good-paying jobs here in America. Our aspiration should be to create a trade agreement that works for working families. Unfortunately, this trade agreement is constructed around a different aspiration, one of maximizing the value of stock in the multinational manufacturing corporations, and that is done by shipping our jobs overseas. That is the wrong aim for this Nation. That is the wrong aim for our working families. We have seen the impact of Korea. We have seen the impact of China joining the WTO. We have seen the impact of Mexico and NAFTA. As a result, we have lost millions of good-paying jobs in our Nation and undermined the success of millions of American families. There is a lot of conversation on the floor of the Senate about inequality in our Nation. Do you know what drives inequality? Well, I will tell you. It is this: When you create trade agreements that are great for investors but are terrible for workers, that drives inequality. That is why I encourage my colleagues to vote no when it comes to the fast-track legislation being voted on later today. It is wrong for America because it is wrong as far as solving inequality. It is wrong for America because it is wrong for working families to have their jobs shipped overseas. It is wrong because it does not fulfill the vision of working for working Americans. Thank you, Mr. President.

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, will my colleague yield for a question?

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the people of the United States expect the Constitution to be upheld and the principles of the Fourth Amendment. They expect that the law that is passed on this floor will be implemented in an appropriate fashion and consistently, and when it is not, our liberty is diminished, our freedom is diminished, and our privacy is diminished. Indeed, what we did yesterday with the USA FREEDOM Act was to end a system in which a court, in secrecy, changes the meaning of the law and does not expose it to the American public. That is a very important improvement, taking us back to the democracy that we are all a part of and that we all love. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 5 minutes.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, yesterday we passed the USA FREEDOM Act, and it was quickly signed by our President because it was so important to put it into place. It contained two items that I want to draw particular attention to. One is that there should be no secret spying on U.S. citizens here in the United States of America. The second is that there should be no secret laws here in the United States of America. These two items are very closely connected together. Our Nation was founded upon the principles of liberty and freedom. Fundamental to the exercise of those principles is the right to privacy, to be free from unreasonable intrusions. This right is central to all other rights protected in the Constitution, especially to the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition our Government. Our sense of privacy and to be secure in our homes and secure with our records goes back to common law in England. It was in 1767 that the Earl of Chatham, when he was debating the cider tax, said: The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. [His cottage] may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter. Certainly, that is the spirit that infused the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution. That amendment says: ``The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. . .'' We need to ensure that our security apparatus, our law enforcement, and our intelligence officers have the tools they need to enact the efforts to keep America secure. But in the process, we cannot sacrifice our constitutional rights as American citizens. There should be no secret spying on Americans and no secret law in a democracy. So how did we end up in that place--the place that I am so glad we took a major stride toward remedying yesterday? It goes back to section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. This Act was passed after the attacks on 9/11. I was not here in the Senate, but it said that our government can access business records or tangible things if it shows that there is a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that those things are relevant to an authorized investigation. That certainly mimics the second half of the Fourth Amendment, which goes on to say that ``no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.'' The responsibility of the government was to prepare a statement of facts, and those statements of facts had to show reasonable grounds and had to show that the things sought were relevant to an authorized investigation. Each one of those words had a significant influence in constraining the potential for the government to collect business records or, particularly, as we came to learn, to collect phone records on American citizens. However, a problem developed, and that is that a secret court was created here in America, a secret court called the FISA Court, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That secret court could interpret the common language of the law, and its interpretations were not disclosed to the U.S. public. So in that process of taking the language of the law that has a clear set of standards and then interpreting it, the court created secret law--secret law that was not disclosed to the citizens of the United States. This is an enormous risk to democracy--a court with no scrutiny and, quite tragically, no presentation of opposing views from the position presented by the government. What kind of court is it that allows no presentation of an opposing view to the view of the government? That is a court that can create tyranny of the government by secretly reinterpreting the plain language of the law. That is exactly what happened. Let's think about how this then went forward. Back in December 2012, I proposed an amendment, and that amendment said that there can be no secret law in America; that if the FISA Court makes an interpretation of terms, that interpretation of those terms has to be made public. Here we have a representation of the importance of shining a light on that secret court, disclosing to the public how it interprets the law and thereby changes the meaning of the law. And what did this court do? This court tipped those terms and said ``authorize investigation.'' That can mean anything that happens in the future, which, of course, makes that term meaningless. It means that there is no authorized investigation. It is just a fictional possibility of the future-- nothing existing right now. And then it took the term ``relevant to an authorized investigation,'' and it said that relevant is irrelevant. You have to show no connection, one or two places removed, in order to secure the right to access the papers, the business records, the phone records of U.S. citizens. So this secret court here in America, the FISA Court, created secret law, wiped out the plain meaning of section 215, put its own interpretation in place, and told no one. This is absolutely unacceptable. That is why I put forward the amendment in December of 2012 that there is no secret law amendment, that this is unacceptable, that we must have disclosure of whatever that court finds so that the public can be informed, so that legislators can be informed, so that we can have a debate on whether that interpretation is consistent with what the legislature intended--what the Senate and the House intended-- and consistent with what the President intended when he signed that law. That amendment did not get a debate at that time in 2012, but the chair of the Intelligence Committee pledged to work with me to ask our government to declassify those opinions of the FISA Court, and she did. I thank very much the senior Senator from California, the former chair of the Intelligence Committee, for her help in doing that. And some of those records, some of those opinions, and some summaries of the interpretation of the law were declassified. That was a step forward, but it should not be dependent on the whim of the executive branch as to whether secret law exists in our country. So I continued to press forward. And then we had a situation occur. In June 2013, Edward Snowden disclosed the existence of the cell phone program. I could not explain in December of 2012 why it was so important to end secret law, but after Edward Snowden's disclosures, I could explain it. In fact, when the National Security Agency chief, Keith Alexander, was testifying, which was shortly after that disclosure, I proceeded to pull out my cell phone and ask the chief: What authorized investigation gives you the authority under section 215 to access my, Senator Merkley's, cell phone records? He was unable to answer that question but said he would seek legal consultation in order to explain what investigation showed that there was a relevant connection and what statement of facts would justify it. But I never got an answer because there was no answer because the government was collecting everything under this secret reinterpretation of law. Yesterday, we ended the era of secret law in America. Yesterday, my no secret law act was incorporated into the USA FREEDOM Act and was signed by the President of the United States. This law says the executive branch must declassify opinions of the FISA Court or, if they find that the exact opinion poses a security risk because of details enclosed therein, must declassify summaries or at a minimum must summarize the significant constructions and interpretations of law found by the FISA Court. That is the heart of it. We are not asking that classified information about facts of a case that could endanger our national security be disclosed. We are asking that interpretations and constructions of law be disclosed so that we have no secret law in America, and that is what is required by the act we passed yesterday. In conclusion, we must not have secret laws in America. We must not have a secret court that has no opposing point of view presented. And when it makes interpretations of law, it must be disclosed to American citizens, who have every right as citizens to know what the law means and to be able to argue whether they like that interpretation, dislike it, think the law should be supported or the law should be changed. May we never again allow a secret court to authorize secret spying on U.S. citizens under the cover of secret law. What we did yesterday--incorporating the no secret law act into the USA FREEDOM Act--was important. To paraphrase William Pitt, the humblest American, no matter his wealth or her income or his status within the community--that no American may be in a situation where he may be unable to say to the U.S. Government: Here in my home, within these walls, however modest, you, the government, may not enter. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. MERKLEY. Well, thank you, because that does show that in fact there were secret----

Mr. MERKLEY. Were the opinions of this court, established by law-- and, yes, it is transparent to the public that the court exists. But the question of secrecy is not one of whether it exists; it is a question of whether the process is open in any feasible way to debate between two points of view. Did the Senator from North Carolina know that the opinions of the court, including interpretations of the law, were never disclosed to the American public and were, in fact, kept secret?

Mr. MERKLEY. The Senator from North Carolina can ask a question, and I get to answer the question.

Mr. MERKLEY. The existence of the court----

Mr. MERKLEY. I will yield.

Mr. MERKLEY. When I have completed my remarks, I will be happy to take a question. And so my colleague comes to the floor and says that there is no secret law. But the fundamental understanding of law is that there is the plain language of the law and there is the interpretation of that by the court. It is only through the combination of those two things that you can know what a law means. So if you have the plain language but you don't have the interpretation that has been assigned by the courts and used to adjudicate cases, then in fact you have secret law because none of us know what the words mean. If you look at the plain language of section 215, it doesn't say: Here are restrictions on how the government examines a body of information, interrogates that body of information, and analyzes that body of information. No. The language is completely about how the government collects that information and whether they can collect that information. It sets a series of clear standards for collecting that information. It says that information cannot be collected unless there is stated analysis, a set of facts that show there is evidence that the information being sought is relevant to an authorized investigation. Now, any common citizen knows, therefore, that the government has to do a statement of facts. They have to state what is the specific investigation, has that investigation been authorized, and is the assorted information relevant that is being requested? Well, ``relevant'' is a very powerful term in the law. It means one or two steps removed. And that is exactly what the Second Circuit found when they looked at this issue just recently. The court's opinion explained that as the program is being implemented, the records demanded are not those of suspects who are under investigation, which would certainly be relevant, or of people or businesses that have contact with suspects under investigation, which is one step removed and certainly would be relevant, or even, the court went on to say, of people or businesses that have contact with others who are in contact with the subjects. That would be two steps removed, and that is stretching the boundaries of what is considered relevant under the definition of the law. The court found that the implementation of the program has extended to every record that exists. The Court found that the implementation of the law extended to every record that exists. So if the implementation by the administration so diverged from the language of the law passed and debated in this Chamber, how did the government--the executive branch--justify its gross deviation from the plain language of the law? Well, here is how they did it. They went to a court that had been created, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and they said: We would like to be able to collect all the information, whether or not it is relevant, because some day, under some situation, we may want to analyze that information, and we would like to have it right at hand. Now, had there been an adversary in this court, the adversary presenting an opposite point of view would have said: Well, not so quick, because there are standards in the case law for relevance. There are standards for what constitutes an authorized investigation. There are certainly standards for what are the means to present evidence to document this. But there was no contrary opinion in this court because the only one arguing the case with no rebuttal and no examination by any group was the government. So we have the government and a judge. That is not really the theory behind the courts. The idea is that we have an examination of an issue with both sides presented so there can be full articulation and full examination of the issues, and then a judge can decide based on full input. But, in this case, we didn't have that input. The government asked for an interpretation that would allow them to do something far different from the plain language of the law, and they got it from this secret court. So, yes, we do have secret courts, operated with no input, and they disclose no opinions. And yes, we did have a secret law, and that ended yesterday, as it should have. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, when colleagues come to the floor and contend that there have been no secret courts in America, that there has been no secret law in America, that the administration of section 215 matched the plain language of the laws adopted by this body, they are wrong on all three counts.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am seeking recognition.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I think it is important, at this point in time, for us to be reminded of the concerns of working people across our Nation. This has been an intense debate, because so often, in the course of the trade agreements we have pursued, the balance on the other end has been simply that millions of jobs have left this Nation. We have lost 5 million jobs and 50,000 factories. That is a tremendous loss for workers across the States seeking for the foundation of successful families because there is no government program that can compare to the value of a living-wage job. What we have seen in the wake of NAFTA and the free-trade agreements that have followed is not only a tremendous loss of jobs but a tremendous increase in inequality in this Nation. Now, we have heard the opinion of some that this is a completely different structure and that we should not be concerned about this being the result of this particular agreement, this particular set of standards, that are going to be brought back to us in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I disagree, and I disagree deeply, and I am going to tell you why. Let's start with the most fundamental issue on level playing field, which is wages that are roughly comparable. The old agreements have no minimum wage. This agreement has no minimum wage. We are creating a structure of a group of seven very poor nations with very low wages, five affluent nations with higher wages. Think about the difference between running an operation in Vietnam or Malaysia or Mexico with a minimum wage of less than $2 per hour and in Vietnam a minimum wage of only about 60 to 70 cents, depending on what part of the country you are in. Think of the difference between that and the minimum wage in the United States. It is a 10-to-1 differential. If you throw in the type of benefits and the labor standards and the environmental standards, it is a differential of probably at least 20 to 1. That is why we are losing jobs in manufacturing. Now, is there anything that puts a minimum wage into this agreement and addresses this key missing factor? There is not. Then let's turn to the rest of the labor and the environmental objectives that are embedded. We have heard a lot that we are now going to have enforceable environmental standards and enforceable labor standards. But the fundamental structure disagreement is the same as agreements we have had before. Now, I applaud my colleagues who are working to tighten the enforcement on cheating on tariffs. That is important. But those are not enforceable labor standards and those are not enforceable environmental standards. Therefore, we can look back at the history of similar agreements and say: When did we ever bring any sort of action on environmental standards government-to-government? The answer is: We have not. When did we ever bring a complaint on labor standards? The answer is: We have done it once. We did it in Guatemala. That was 7 years ago. We still don't have any resolution of that single complaint, that single challenge. So in order to have something that was fundamentally different, we would have to have something like snapback tariffs--a situation where a country deeply violated its promises on labor standards, deeply violated its standards or promises on environmental standards, and that there be some sort of quick and certain reversal of the benefits of trade agreements, but there is nothing like that in this agreement. There is no change. So here we are, repeating the same basic structure that has existed in the other agreements, with no changes for America and therefore no improvement for the workers of the United States of America. Now, there are objectives that have been placed into fast-track, but those objectives require an agreement to come back with areas to be addressed, such as human rights and so forth that have been much vaunted. Those are objectives. Those are not standards. If we were serious about saying what an agreement had to have in it to come and get the privileges of fast-track, we would have converted those objectives into standards. That was one of the amendments that we never debated on the floor of the Senate, so we never wrestled with this deep deficiency. Then, of course, we have the investor-state dispute settlement portion of this, and we have been affirmed here that we normally win when we are challenged. And that is correct--we have mostly won when we are challenged. We have won because we have out-lawyered the other side because, in general, we don't expropriate. But we have not won under all the trade agreements. We lost a case on tuna that was dolphin-free or dolphin-friendly tuna labels. Why did we lose it? Because under the WTO, Mexico challenged it. Under WTO, they challenged it and said: This discriminates against the way we fish, and we lost. We lost on turtles. We lost on cotton. What happened last week? Well, we lost on the labeling of food grown in the United States of America. The WTO said we cannot label our beef as USA made or raised or born or harvested. I tell you this. I want to live in a country where, if our legislators, at the local level, at the State level, at the Federal level, want to pass a law that informs every citizen about where food is grown because the citizens want to know, it should be possible to do so. We should not give away our sovereignty to international panels that can make decisions that wipe out our consumer laws or our environmental laws--and there was a proposal to make sure we did not end up with that in this agreement, and it was defeated. So we still have this substantial risk of losing future cases, just as we lost on dolphins, just as we lost on turtles, and just as we lost last week on the labeling of food in the United States of America. This particular issue of labeling our food goes to the heart of who we are--free people who want to make decisions for the health and safety of our families. The way we do that is when we buy things, we find out information, and that information has to be on the label. I was reading here earlier an article about how shrimp is raised in Vietnam. It is farmed in pools, and it doesn't meet any of the standards we would like, so they get artificial documentation and it is shipped at high volumes into the United States. Consumer Reports came out with a report recently, and they said: Don't buy shrimp unless it is produced in the United States, particularly don't buy it if it comes from Vietnam. There is another example of why we should, if we want to be able to, have labels on our food that say ``Made in America'' or ``Made in Vietnam.'' Consumers should have a choice, so they can see Consumer Reports and find out that shrimp is full of deadly bacteria, when they receive Consumer Reports, and find out that shrimp is full of antibiotics that are put in because of deadly bacteria, and they don't want their children exposed to those bacteria. If they don't want them exposed to bacteria, they should be able to make that decision, but we can't do that if we give away our sovereignty to international dispute resolution panels. So there are a host of problems inherent in this trade agreement and in this fast-track that have not been resolved. We have not addressed having a minimum wage and steadily over time reducing the disparity between the lowest paid countries and the highest paid countries so our workers will not be at this massive disadvantage. We have not addressed the enforcement of labor provisions because we have not developed anything different from what we have done before, and we are unable to enforce them. We have only tried once, and we are still out after 7 years with Guatemala. We haven't even tried with the environmental side, it is so difficult. We have left intact an international panel of corporate lawyers who on one issue can be the advocate, on the next can be the judge. It is full of conflict of interest. We haven't addressed that. So here is the bottom line: Do we want to live in an America where the middle class is going to be wiped out because we have pulled out all the barriers between very low-wage countries, low-enforcement countries, low-labor-standard countries, low environmental standards, and our economy--which then creates tremendous pressure for our own wages and standards to diminish. Why does it create pressure? Because companies say: You know what. If you push for higher wages or better working conditions, we are going to move our factory overseas or they say: You know what. We already have a factory overseas. We are going to increase our production there and decrease our production here. That is the pressure here on wages and working conditions in the United States of America. What about the people overseas? This agreement is designed so companies who are producing in China--which will not be part of the agreement at this point in time--can say: If you raise your wages and your working conditions, we will go to Malaysia, and if Malaysia raises theirs, we will go to Vietnam. So it isn't good for the foreign workers any more than it is for the American workers. There was an article yesterday in the Washington Post. The columnist or the op-ed writer said: It is basically like this. This agreement is, like previous agreements, very good for the investor class. Because if companies can produce things at the lowest possible cost, that will raise their stock prices. However, he said, it is really bad for the working class because less and less will go to the workers under these types of competitive pressures between the United States or taking the work overseas or between one nation overseas and another nation overseas. So I will conclude this simply by saying: This is why I voted against this fast-track, because this fast-track is deeply flawed. It does not address the fundamental issues that have been identified in previous agreements. Going down this track and bringing the Trans-Pacific Partnership to this Chamber, with no ability to mend it, no ability to extend debate because debate will be limited, no ability to hold it to the normal standards in the Senate in terms of closing the debate-- because of all that, this is simply the wrong direction to go. In this final effort, in this final set of time before we take the final vote, let's recognize it is important that we, as Senators representing the citizens of the United States, not simply fight for the investor class; let's fight to make work work for working Americans.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, returning to the conversation about trade policy and its impact on American workers and businesses, President Kennedy once said, ``The trade of a nation expresses, in a very concrete way, its aim and its aspirations.'' Well, what are our aims and aspirations in crafting a new trade structure? The President says that his aim and aspiration is to be the writer of rules for trade in Asia. I have a different aspiration. My aspiration is that we create trade that creates living-wage jobs in America, that puts people to work making things in America. If we don't make things in America, we will not have a middle class in America. So as we contemplate a massive new trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the bill before us to fast-track consideration of that Trans-Pacific Partnership, we should ask ourselves this question: Is this about our geostrategic goal of being the leader in writing the rules or is it about writing rules that actually work for working Americans? Because, you see, working America has done very poorly under this goal of geostrategic influence. Oh, yeah, we had NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. We had CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement. What was the result of that? Well, we lost 5 million jobs in America. We lost 5 million jobs. We lost 50,000 factories. If you go around Oregon, you can see those factory sites. I recently visited the Blue Heron site. Just a few years ago, there were hundreds of workers at the Blue Heron paper factory, but under the structure of one trade agreement--WTO--those jobs went to China. Paper manufacturing went to China. The equipment was pulled up out of that factory, leaving a big hole, and shipped overseas. That is what happened. We lost our factories. We lost our jobs. There has been a lot of discussion that this is a new trade agreement, that it establishes enforceable standards for labor. Well, perhaps the single most important standard is minimum wage. Minimum wage is about resisting the full exploitation of workers, the full race to the bottom. So, of course, I am sure the proponents would say: Well, of course we have addressed that. That is central. That is the central ingredient, is to make sure that there is not a race to the bottom and that we address the fact that every nation that will be part of this agreement will have to have a minimum wage, a minimum wage that rises over time, a minimum wage that provides a basic standard of living so that we do not have conditions of full exploitation, miserable sweatshops, if you will, that are producing the goods we are buying here in America under this agreement. So it may come as a shock to people across America that this most fundamental standard of minimum wage is not addressed in this agreement. What do we have right now? We have 12 countries. We have two countries--Brunei and Singapore--with no minimum-wage standard at all. Then we have Mexico at 66 cents and Vietnam--for Vietnam, they set a monthly minimum wage and they set it regionally. So the number varies according to how you calculate it. Some would call it 57 cents; others would say 74 cents. Let's just put it this way: The minimum wage in Vietnam is way under $1 per hour. In Malaysia, it is $1.54; Peru, $1.55; Chile, $2.25. So does this Trans-Pacific Partnership have a requirement that there be a minimum wage that will rise up workers and stop these sweatshops across the world so that we are not buying products from sweatshops with miserable, slave-like conditions? It does not. It has no such provision. It has no minimum wage, which leads us to another fundamental observation. What this trade agreement does is set up a dynamic between these very low wage countries and countries that are developed and aspiring to create living-wage jobs here. But what happens when you have manufacturing in these high-wage countries, high-environmental-standard countries, high-labor-standard countries and high-enforcement countries and the manufacturer looks out and sees a competitor, in a free-trade regime, in these very low-wage, low-labor, low-environmental, and low- enforcement countries? Well, it is obvious: The manufacturing migrates to the place that is the cheapest. That is the way free enterprise works--it goes to where you can make the most profit. So it is not some absurd, unexpected result that NAFTA resulted in the loss of 5 million good-paying jobs in America. It is not some unexpected result that we lost 50,000 factories. When he was campaigning for President, Ross Perot said: If you adopt NAFTA, you will hear the sound of the jobs leaving America. Well, that is exactly what happened--exactly what happened. So is it a fact that this new-generation trade agreement actually address this core problem? Well, the answer is, it does not. It does not do anything to address this disparity between very low wages and prosperous countries. This is going to be, as Ross Perot put it, another situation with a giant sucking sound of jobs leaving America. Proponents of this treaty say: Well, we have done something very significant. We have taken the labor and environmental side agreements and we have put them in the center of the agreement. This is pretty much like moving deck chairs on the Titanic. You move them from one location to another location. How does that change the outcome? Well, it doesn't. It just means they are printed in a different part of the text. That is not very good news, if you will, to workers across the United States of America who have been assured there is something fundamentally different about this agreement. These labor standards and these environmental standards that are in the agreement--we have heard a lot about enforcement, and there is nothing new to enforce in these labor and environmental standards. I want to take a little detour here because there are some important enforcement standards that my colleagues have put forward. My colleague from Oregon has put forward the ENFORCE Act. This is important for enforcing tariffs. This is important for enforcing the movement of goods illegally through third parties in order to bypass tariffs in the United States. That is a good step forward, but that does not address the core of this issue which is enforcement of the labor and environmental standards. Now, we have the same basic standards in various trade agreements, and they are never enforced because there is no effective mechanism for enforcement. Let me expand a little bit on what has gone on and then point out that nothing has been done to fix it. You essentially have a set of standards and these standards are the International Labor Organization standards, ILO standards. These ILO standards address a series of things. These ILO standards are things such as child labor. That is a bad idea. It should stop. It addresses that union organizing should be allowed, and that is a good thing. So the standards themselves are solid and respectable. But when a nation becomes part of the trade agreement, how do you have them enforce those standards. That is what is missing--no enforcement for these standards. There is a government-to-government process for consultations when the United States is upset that someone is not enforcing. Ultimately, they can file a case. That case can take years and years and years to adjudicate, and it never gets done. The number of labor standard enforcement actions that have been completed is zero. The number of environmental enforcement standards that have been completed is zero--zero, zero. So if we take a broken system from existing trade treaties and slip it into a new trade treaty, what is the expected result? No enforcement of these standards. All the parties know that. They can put these laws on the books, but there is not going to be enforcement. There is one case--one case alone--that we have sought to proceed to enforce and that is with Guatemala. With Guatemala, they have massive labor violations. They are not making the slightest attempt to follow the ILO. We held consultations, more consultations, and more consultations, and finally filed a case. It has gone on and on and on and never gotten to a conclusion. So we still have zero, zero enforcement. Now, one reason it doesn't get to a conclusion is because there is no enthusiasm behind any form of enforcement, and why is that? First, our government says: Well, if we try to enforce it, it will create ripples in the relationship. That country will be upset with us if we try to enforce a labor standard and an environmental standard. Then, second, they will say: No, there be will retaliation. They will file suits against us, and we will have to spend all this time responding, and what is the point of that. That is unproductive. We say they are not meeting it. They say we are not meeting it. Then, third, and very importantly, the companies that have invested under that trade agreement in that nation, they come out and tell the government: What are you doing? The goal of the trade agreement was to create a stable environment for investments. You are destabilizing that by filing a grievance against this country, so don't do it. In the end, if you ever got to an enforcement action, well, that would hurt us because we put our factory there, and now we would be subject to tariffs. So this combination means that structure is completely dysfunctional, and that structure is exactly what is in TPP. So this is why we are coming forward and saying now is the time to fully debate how we tackle this problem so we can stop pontificating about strong labor and environmental standards and actually have a structure that creates that within the 12 nations that are considered being part of TPP. So that is the distinction. Significant, valuable attention is being paid to enforcement of tariffs and efforts to bypass through third-party shipments, our Customs structure--and that is important. But the labor standards and the environmental standards, enforcement is zero, and that same broken system is being imported into the TPP. Yesterday, I came to the floor and I tried to pull up amendments. We are being told the leaders on this bill want to choose, pluck, and pick just the amendments they want to allow to be debated, unlike in the past, where we have had a situation where people have been invited to come to the floor and make their amendments pending, and then we worked through those amendments. So we spent time addressing the issues that Senators thought were important. That is a robust and open process. But despite the promises of the majority leader for an open and robust amendment process, we do not have that. We have a behind-the- scenes negotiation with amendments picked and plucked according to what the proponents of this deal want to have, and the rest of us are out in the cold. So I have these four amendments that I would be happy to pull up at any time that is allowed. I already tried yesterday, so I will not try to do it again, but let me tell you the types of things they address. One is it takes on the core deficiency in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is that it does not have any minimum wage. So it simply says:

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. I see my colleagues on the floor who have their own amendments to address. I will conclude by saying that if I can't get up one of my four amendments to be debated--all substantive and all addressing key components of this agreement--then this is not a robust process, this is not an open process, and I ask the majority leader to keep his vision that he laid out on this floor that this would be an open process and a robust process. Thank you. Several Senators addressed the Chair.