I worked diligently alongside our labor community to ensure that the priorities of our community were reflected in the USMCA, helping to secure strong enforcement mechanisms, protections for workers and the environment, and provisions to lower the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs.
The trade agreement itself does have labor and environmental protections, but we have to stand for human rights and we have to make sure that violence isn't being perpetrated against workers who are just trying to organize for their rights.
Having yet another vote on refinery legislation that uses high oil prices as an excuse to weaken environmental protections and to give more legislative gifts to the oil industry is misguided in the extreme.
Without international participation, jobs and emissions will simply shift overseas to countries that require few, if any, environmental protections, harming the global environment as well as the U.S. economy.
Justice Scalia was a person who effectively bludgeoned the life out of the living Constitution, the Constitution that gave us desegregation, that gave us women's rights, that gave us environmental protections and political access.
For TPP to get my vote, it must benefit America's middle class, raise wages, and safeguard the consumer and environmental protections that we rely upon.
I am going to confront the old-fashioned negative thinking which says that all government needs to do to generate growth is cut worker and environmental protections, cut taxes on the rich and stroke 'fat cats' until they purr with pleasure. I'm completely repudiating the idea that government has to get out of the way.
As I have said all along, for any trade promotion authority bill to gain my support, it must require strong, enforceable environmental and labor protections.
Strong, enforceable environmental protections will not only help protect our planet for future generations, it will also level the playing field for small-and-medium-sized U.S. businesses by raising environmental standards.
Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today's political scene.
I have voted against only one of President Obama's nominees: Michael Froman, a Citigroup alumnus who is currently storming the halls of Congress as U.S. Trade Representative pushing trade deals that threaten to undermine financial regulation, workers' rights, and environmental protections.
