Senators Get Warning on Import Curbs

U.S. Trade Representative Clayton K. Yeutter urged senators today to resist any temptation to tamper with presidential authority over import restraints, declaring them “the H-bomb of trade policy.”

He told the Senate Finance Committee, which is expected to draft trade legislation next month, that import restraints represent the most powerful weapon in the trade arsenal “and H-bombs ought to be dropped by the President and nobody else.”

The Administration is against legislation that would take from the President the flexibility to hold off on imposing import restraints and instead make them mandatory, Yeutter said.

He said that without such latitude, “we would have had a trade war” last year when the United States and the European Economic Community clashed over U.S. grain exports.

Attitude Questioned

Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.) questioned whether “the attitude toward the substantive issue has changed at all” from last year among Administration officials, despite their efforts to take part in drafting a House bill.

“The House has been giving and the Administration has been taking but the Administration hasn’t been giving at all,” the steel-state senator said.

He also suggested he was not that impressed with 100% tariffs ordered by the Administration Friday against Japanese electronics in retaliation for alleged failure to abide by a 6-month-old semiconductor agreement.

“In my judgment, the Japanese have been getting away with murder for years and now that our country is littered with the bodies of dead and dying industries, the President is announcing that we may impose capital punishment,” Heinz said.

Disagreed on Flexibility

Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, a Texas Democrat, told Yeutter that he disagreed with the Administration position that flexibility is always better in trade matters. He also disputed the trade representative’s statement that without such flexibility a trade war would have erupted as a result of the feed-grain dispute arising from Spain and Portugal joining the European Economic Community.

“You don’t know that,” Bentsen said. “I don’t know that.”

Bentsen said “last week’s retaliation against Japan--while it was greeted positively here in Congress and among Americans in general--was hardly thoughtful or coordinated.”

“If we had in place a trade policy that was thoughtful and coordinated, the Japanese would have learned long ago not to sign trade agreements with us unless they intended to live up to them,” Bentsen said. He said that the “key word here” was not flexibility but predictability.