“If America does not speak out for human rights in China because of commercial interests,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said recently, “we lose all moral authority to speak out for human rights any place in the world.”

With that remark in mind, we hope Speaker Pelosi will act to move two pieces of legislation to the floor and shepherd the bills through whatever revisions are necessary to enable them to become law.

One such bill, sponsored by Rep. Fred Keller, R-Pa., would toughen trade rules against Chinese-subsidized development in other nations.

Others, spearheaded by fellow Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., include a resolution Perry said would protect members of Falun Gong, a Chinese religious movement, from purported organ harvesting by their government and a bill to designate the country’s ruling Communist Party an international criminal group.

They follow a new law that would ban many imports from the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, where U.S. officials claim the government employs forced labor.

The record of the Chinese government’s violations of human rights and harassment and unjust imprisonment of religious minorities is well-established and decades-long. The United States’ discomfort in confronting that record is a relic of the Cold War and the Nixon administration, surviving because of globalization and an appetite for cheap labor.

Measures such as Keller’s and Perry’s are long overdue, and we hope Pelosi demonstrates her commitment to her words regarding America’s moral authority by helping these bills pass the U.S. House.