Senator David Perdue (R-GA) praised the passage of the updated United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement:
He said, “President Trump is fighting for American workers, farmers, and manufacturers, and there is no better evidence of this than his commitment to negotiating better trade deals with countries across the world.
The USMCA is a groundbreaking deal that will dramatically improve the way we do business with our closest trading partners. It will create nearly 180,000 new jobs and increase U.S. GDP by about $68 billion. Not only will the USMCA continue our country’s historic economic turnaround, but it will also give the Trump Administration negotiating power in trade talks with China and other countries.
“The American people should be outraged that U.S. House Democrats have held this bipartisan deal hostage while they aimlessly pursued their illegitimate impeachment trial. It should not have taken more than a year to get to this point, but finally, Congress and the Trump Administration will have the opportunity to deliver this huge win for the entire country.”
Senator Lamar Alexander said, “Updating NAFTA makes sense, and the agreement announced today will continue to raise family incomes and create even more good-paying jobs, which is good news for Tennessee auto workers and farmers.
“I believe the president’s stated goal of ‘zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies’ is exactly the right goal for Tennessee’s auto industry, manufacturers and farmers, and a welcome movement away from piling tariffs on top of tariffs that threaten to destroy jobs and lower family incomes. Tariffs are taxes, plain and simple.
"Tennessee’s automotive industry is so important to me because in 1978, when I was running for governor, Tennessee hardly had any auto jobs. Now, 136,000 Tennesseans – one third of our state’s manufacturing jobs – work in the automotive industry at plants and suppliers in 88 of our 95 counties. One of the reasons Tennessee has been able to have so much success building cars and SUVs is because the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was fundamentally a zero tariff trade agreement.”