Portman Cheers Trump's China Confrontation, Criticizes Auto Tariff Threat
A third of Ohio farmers' production is exported, and 25 percent of Ohio's manufacturing jobs are supported by exports, said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who was U.S. Trade Representative during the George W. Bush administration. Portman, who gave a speech on the Senate floor the evening of May 22, praised the Trump administration for lifting Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico so that the NAFTA rewrite can be passed in Congress and in Mexico and Canada.
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"It ends the retaliation by Mexico and Canada on 'Made in Ohio' exports to our northern and southern neighbors. And this was really starting to bite in my home state and around the country," he said. "It also, by the way, protects against import surges and transshipments, particularly with regard to steel and aluminum. We worry about transshipments coming from China into countries like Mexico and Canada and then being shipped or snuck into the United States."
But Portman, who is sponsoring a bill that would change how Section 232 investigations are done, said "it's not accurate" that imported autos are a national security threat, as the administration has asserted. "I think that minivans from Canada, as an example, aren’t a national security threat to us. It may be they are unfairly traded. We should enforce our trade laws. It may be that there’s an import surge that hurts our domestic industry. Then go after them. But to use this tool in that sort of way I think is not appropriate," he said.
Portman said he hopes the new NAFTA can be ratified promptly, because that will reduce uncertainty for U.S. businesses, but he said that resolving the China trade conflict quickly would do even more in that regard. Even as he said that, he said Donald Trump is right to take on China. He told a story about how he visited China in the mid-'80s and saw the first Jeeps produced in China. "People were thinking, this is interesting, we’re going to be doing business with China, and those Jeeps can then be sold in China and other parts of Asia. It wasn’t to compete with the U.S. market. And this was good for Jeep and good for China. That was at a time when they were encouraging foreign auto investment.
“But as China learned about auto manufacturing from these investments -- in other words, they got knowledge about how to manufacture automobiles themselves -- the foreign investment catalog changed its position from ‘encouraged’ to ‘permitted,’ and then more recently in 2015 to ‘restricted.’ So, again, this is an evolution where initially they say bring it in, have a joint venture partner, and we’ll get the technology, thus it goes from ‘encouraged’ to ‘permitted’ and then finally to ‘restricted’ now that China has that technology," he said. "That’s kind of leapfrogging us, isn’t it? And, again, that doesn’t seem fair and it is certainly not reciprocal because we don’t do the same thing here in this country."