"And let us not forget that the Constitution grants Congress..."

"And let us not forget that the Constitution grants Congress, and Congress alone, the authority to regulate trade and craft tax laws.  Congress cannot cede that authority to the WTO or any other international body.  Nor can the president legally sign any treaty that purports to do so.  Our Founders never intended for America to become entangled in global trade schemes, and they certainly never intended to have our domestic laws overridden by international bureaucrats." -Pave 99 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"This outrageous affront to our national sovereignty..."

"This outrageous affront to our national sovereignty was of course predictable when we joined the WTO.  During congressional debates we were assured that entry into the organization posed no threat to our sovereignty.  A well-known libertarian think tank, where you might expect some skepticism of a supra-national bureaucracy managing trade, offered us this rosy description: "The WTO's dispute settlement mechanism helps nations resolve trade disputes without resorting to costly trade wars.  The system relies on voluntary compliance and does not compromise national sovereignty."  That was nonsense.  A Congressional Research Service report was quite clear about the consequences of our membership: "As a member of the WTO, the United States does commit to act in accordance with the rules of the multi-lateral body.  It is legally obligated to insure that national laws do not conflict with WTO rules."

The WTO has given us the worst of both worlds:  we've sacrificed national sovereignty by changing our domestic laws at the behest of an international body, yet we still face trade wars over a variety of products.  If anything, the WTO makes trade relations worse by providing our foreign competitors with a collective means to attack U.S. trade interests." -Page 98 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Congress has changed American tax laws for the...."

"Congress has changed American tax laws for the sole reason that the World Trade Organization decided that our rules unfairly impacted the European Union.  I recall a congressional session in which, with hundreds of tax bills languishing in the House Ways and Means Committee, the one bill drafted strictly to satisfy the WTO was brought to the floor and passed with great urgency.

In one case, the WTO sided with the Europeans against American tax law, which offered tax breaks to American companies doing business overseas.  According to the European Union, the Foreign Sales Corporation program, established under President Reagan in 1984, is now an "illegal subsidy," a view that a WTO appellate panel shared  The WTO's Orwellian ruling declared that allowing a company to keep more of its own money through lower taxes was a "subsidy."  As a matter of fact, the program was moreover really just compensating (and only partially at that) for unfair U.S. taxes on corporations for profits earned overseas, a disability that our foreign competitors do not have to confront from their own governments. 

What this means, in plain English, was that high-tax Europe, upset at lower-tax America, decided that the way to level the playing field was to force America to raise her taxes.  Pascal Lamy, the trade czar of the European Union, actually visited with influential members of Congress in order to determine whether a new tax bill was being crafted to his satisfaction.   If Mr. Lamy, a member of the French Socialist Party, had been unsatisfied with the changes made to our tax code, he threatened to unleash a European trade war against U.S. imports.  In effect he was a foreign bureaucrat acting as a shadow legislator by intervening in our lawmaking process.  And to no one's surprise, Congress raced to comply with the WTO ruling that American tax rules must be changed in order to bring them in to harmony with "international law." -Pages 97 & 98 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"To establish genuine free trade, no such transfer of power..."

"To establish genuine free trade, no such transfer of power is necessary.  True free trade does not require treaties or agreements between governments.  On the contrary, true freed trade occurs in the absence of government intervention in the free flow of goods across borders.  Organizations like the WTO and NAFTA represent government-managed trade schemes, not free trade.  The WTO, purported to exist to lower tariffs, is actually the agency that grants permission for tariffs to be applied when complaints of dumping are levied.  Government-managed trade is inherently political, meaning that politicians and bureaucrats determine who wins and loses in the marketplace. 

Granting quasi-governmental international bodies the power to make decisions about American trade rules compromises American sovereignty in dangerous and unacceptable ways."  -Pages 96 & 97 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"In my strong support for free trade, I have felt compelled to..."

"In my strong support for free trade, I have felt compelled to oppose many of the trade agreements that have appeared in recent years.  For instance, although I was not in Congress at the time, I opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, both of which were heavily favored by the political establishment.  Initial grounds for suspicion was the sheer length of the text of these agreements: no free-trade agreement need to be 20,000 pages long." -Page 95 of The Revolution, A Manifesto