A statement from Senate Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, following a meeting of House and Senate Republicans and Democrats with Benjamin Powell, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

The Administration has demanded that Congress immunize major telecommunications companies from legal liability for their participation in a government surveillance program about which many questions have been raised. On an issue of this magnitude, it is imperative that our deliberations be thoughtful and thorough. Anything less would be an abdication of our responsibility.

Certainly true, and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on S. 2248, the FISA amendments, reflected thoughtful and thorough deliberation.

Congressional hearings can sometimes be snoozefests. But Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel Wire Products, knows how to add punch to the process.

Greenblatt, whose Baltimore company manufactures made-to-order wire and hook products, testified on behalf of the National Association of Manufacturers before the House Small Business Committee.

The hearing was on the need to fix the Paperwork Reduction Act to ease the blizzard of regulatory paperwork businesses have to contend with. The chore of filling out Internal Revenue Service and other documentation is so onerous, Greenblatt and executives at other companies often have to hire outside consultants to do the work.

That money could go to other things, like hiring new workers or research.

Instead of just talking about the problem, Greenblatt showed lawmakers the problem. He displayed a photo of two of his workers standing in front of boxes of all the paperwork he has to fill out in a year.

The stack of boxes was more than six feet high, taller than his employees.

“We have grown 33 percent in the last two years and tripled in the last 10 years,” he said. “We are adding people. We want to keep adding people, not adding paperwork.”

All that paperwork is stifling American competitiveness. According to a NAM report, structural costs for manufacturers in the United States were 31.7% higher in 2006 than for our major trade competitors.

From President Bush’s news conference today:

Members should also act on a very urgent priority, and that is to pass legislation our intelligence officials need to quickly and effectively monitor terrorist communications. At issue is a dispute over whether telecommunications companies should be subjected to class-action lawsuits because they are believed to have helped defend America after the attacks of 9/11. Allowing these lawsuits to proceed would be unfair. If any of these companies helped us, they did so after being told by our government that their assistance was legal and vital to our national security.

Allowing the lawsuits to proceed could aid our enemies, because the litigation process could lead to the disclosure of information about how we conduct surveillance, and it would give al Qaeda and others a roadmap as to how to avoid the surveillance. Allowing these lawsuits to proceed could make it harder to track the terrorists, because private companies besieged by and fearful of lawsuits would be less willing to help us quickly get the information we need. Without the cooperation of the private sector, we cannot protect our country from terrorist attack.

Protecting these companies from lawsuits is not a partisan issue. Republicans and Democrats in the United States Senate came together and passed a good bill, protecting private companies from these abusive lawsuits. And Republicans and Democrats in the House stand ready to pass the Senate bill, if House leaders would only stop blocking an up or down vote and let the majority in the House prevail.

House floor schedule for Thursday.

Suspensions (7 Bills):

1) S. 2478 – To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 59 Colby Corner in East Hampstead, New Hampshire, as the “Captain Jonathan D. Grassbaugh Post Office.” (Sen. Sununu – Oversight and Government Reform)

2) S. 2272 – To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service known as the Southpark Station in Alexandria, Louisiana, as the John “Marty” Thiels Southpark Station, in honor and memory of Thiels, a Louisiana postal worker who was killed in the line of duty on October 4, 2007 (Sen. Vitter – Oversight and Government Reform)

3) H.R. 3936 – To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 116 Helen Highway in Cleveland, Georgia, as the “Sgt. Jason Harkins Post Office.” (Rep. Deal – Oversight and Government Reform)

4) H.R. 3803 – To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 3100 Cashwell Drive in Goldsboro, North Carolina, as the “John Henry Wooten, Sr. Post Office Building.”(Rep. Butterfield – Oversight and Government Reform)

5) H.R. 4454 – To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 3050 Hunsinger Lane in Louisville, Kentucky, as the “Iraq and Afghanistan Fallen Military Heroes of Louisville Memorial Post Office Building”, in honor of the servicemen and women from Louisville, Kentucky, who died in service during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Rep. Yarmuth – Oversight and Government Reform)

6) S.Con.Res. 67 – A concurrent resolution establishing the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (Sen. Feinstein – House Administration)

7) S.Con.Res. 68 – A concurrent resolution authorizing the use of the rotunda of the Capitol by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (Sen. Feinstein – House Administration)

CQ Politics reports House may take up surveillance legislation next week, but what legislation? “‘We don’t have agreement but … I am very hopeful that we will have legislation on the floor next week,’ House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , D-Md., said on the floor Thursday in a colloquy with Minority Whip Roy Blunt , R-Mo.”

From The Financial Times:

Mexico and Canada yesterday voiced concerns about calls by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, as the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete to adopt the most sceptical stance towards free trade before next week’s Ohio primary.

Via Instapundit, which also links to a good column on trade’s benefits by Steve Chapman, “Why Are These People So Ashamed of NAFTA?”

As for Ohio, the NAM has prepared a fact sheet on trade, exports and Ohio’s economy.

From The Detroit Free Press comes a 13-paragraph Gannett News Service story on the EPA’s proposed rule on ground-level ozone emissions, i.e., smog, “U.S. moving to clear the smog
Rules would be first update since 1997.”

Of the 13 paragraphs, one represents the point of view of those who criticize stricter rules as unwarranted and economically damaging. It’s a fair-enough summary, to be sure, although it doesn’t mention the lack of environmental justification for the increased rules.

But a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, which opposes any change in the smog rules, said many communities are struggling to meet the 1997 standards and would suffer economic losses if pushed to go further to clean up their power plants, factories and tailpipe emissions.

The story basically comes down to a 10-to-1 reporting imbalance in favor of the advocates of increased regulation.

From the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog, February 26, reporting on North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan’s endorsement of Barack Obama for president:

[Dorgan] has been one of the fiercest Senate critics of free trade, including the North American Free Trade Agreement. He said the fact that Obama “has always opposed Nafta” was a major factor in his endorsement.

From The Bismarck Tribune, February 26:

North Dakota ranked top in the nation for export growth in 2007, according to U.S. Commercial Service reports.

The state’s exports totaled $2 billion in 2007, up 34 percent from its $1.5 billion in exports in 2006; nationally, export growth was 12 percent more than the previous year.

Among the top export destinations were Canada, which represented 49 percent of the market, Mexico, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Ukraine and Australia.

The House yesterday passed H.R. 5264, extending the Andean Trade Preference Act. Here’s how Reuters describes the action.

On a voice vote, the House approved a 10-month extension of the Andean trade preference program, which provides Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia with duty-free access to the U.S. market for most of their exports.

So those countries — Colombia! — have duty-free access to the United States already. That must mean that a free trade agreement with, say, Colombia, will not be lowering U.S. tariffs, since they’re already gone. Which means that the lowering of trade barriers will be on Colombia’s part, creating greater access for U.S.-made products.

And why are people opposing it?

From CQ Politics, a story on passage of H.R. 5351, the $18 billion tax increase on oil and natural gas producers.

Meanwhile, Citgo Petroleum Corp. would continue to receive a 6 percent deduction for domestic manufacturing that the largest firms would lose.

Citgo, which refines oil and markets and transports gasoline in the United States, is owned by a subsidiary of the government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or PDVSA. Because Citgo does not drill for oil and gas domestically or abroad, it does not fall under the bill’s definition of companies that will lose a major tax break.

The five big companies targeted by the bill — Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, Shell and ConocoPhillips — all produce and refine oil and sell gasoline in the United States, and therefore under the bill would lose the domestic manufacturing deduction they received as part of a corporate tax law in 2004 (PL 108-357).

¿Cómo se dice “perverse incentive” en español?

Although our first instinct was to think that the Citgo-Joe Kennedy propaganda campaign really did pay off, it’s more likely that this is just what happens when politicians pick winners and losers in the marketplace.

From an editorial, “Unilateral Democrats.”

Democrats claim the world hates America because President Bush has behaved like a global bully. But we don’t recall him ever ordering an ally to rewrite an existing agreement on American terms — or else.

Yet that’s exactly what both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are now promising to do to our closest neighbors, Mexico and Canada. At their Ohio debate on Tuesday, first Mrs. Clinton, followed ever so quickly by Mr. Obama, pledged to pull America out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if the two countries don’t agree to rewrite it on Yankee terms. How’s that for global “unilateralism”?

The embrace of pro-export, pro-economic growth, pro-jobs free-trade policies has a long bipartisan history (go far enough back, and the Republicans were the party of high tariffs), so it’s discouraging to see leaders of one party heat the rhetoric up so high.

In the end, facts and history will win out over populist tub-thumping.

By opening the continent to investment and trade, capital has found more efficient uses, with benefits to producers and consumers alike. In Nafta’s first decade after 1993, trade between the U.S. and Mexico multiplied to $232 billion from $81 billion. Trade with Canada has also blossomed, with Canadian exports to the U.S. by surface transport rising 79% in a decade and U.S. exports to Canada increasing 38%.

The deal also increased U.S. productivity. U.S. firms found they could be more globally competitive by putting some manufacturing in Mexico or Canada while retaining high-end production in the U.S. This has resulted in what John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, has called “the highly integrated North American industrial base, particularly between Canada and the U.S.” Such flexibility may have saved thousands of U.S. jobs from going abroad. In the first 10 years of the deal, the U.S. economy added 18 million jobs and the jobless rate sank to record lows.

Yes, it’s hard to envision electoral success for a campaign based on reversing economic growth.

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission held a hearing in Cambridge, MA, on broadband network management practices. (For commissioners’ statements, scroll down.)

From the Hands off the Internet coalition:

The following statement may be attributed to Mike McCurry and Christopher Wolf, co-chairs of the Hands Off the Internet coalition (HandsOff.org):

“For the typical Net user, today’s hearing is not just an academic debate about government policy. If the FCC yields to those pushing for government regulation over the Internet, the result will be higher broadband access costs, which fewer Americans will be able to afford. Our focus should be on new and faster access choices, not policies that tie this progress down in red tape and bureaucracy.”

The Hands Off the Internet coalition is a Washington, DC-based coalition of companies and nonprofit organizations that believes the Internet has flourished because government has not tried to regulate it. Members include Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, 3M, the National Association of Manufacturers, FiberControl, and Cinergy Communications. Nonprofit members include Citizens Against Government Waste, the American Conservative Union and the National Black Chamber of Commerce.