Bill to Protect Shoe, Textile Industries Is Dead for the Year

The House failed to override President Bush’s veto of legislation to protect the textile and shoe industries from imports. The 275-152 tally, which fell 12 votes short of the two-thirds necessary to overturn the veto, kills the bill for the year.

The Bush Administration said the bill, if enacted into law, would undermine the global trade liberalization talks scheduled to be completed this year.

Advocates, who have pressed the legislation three times in the last five years, said the industry would disappear if imports of foreign goods were not curbed. Defeat of the bill, said Rep. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), a shoe manufacturing state, “is a death sentence for these very important industries.”

But opponents of the legislation managed to turn it back by arguing that textiles and apparel are already more protected than any other industry and pointed out the bill would sharply raise clothing prices to preserve only a comparative handful of jobs. “This is the rest of America versus the textile industry,” said Rep. Sam Gibbons (D-Fla.).