Rebuild America Jobs Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight to discuss an issue I have addressed many times in this Chamber over the course of the past few years, and that is the urgent need for this Congress to come together to pass policies that will spur job creation in our country. I know the Presiding Officer, my colleague from Colorado, has done so in powerful ways himself. I want to talk specifically about the Rebuild America Jobs Act, legislation that is pending as I stand here and as you sit here for Senate debate.

We both know that the Rebuild America Jobs Act is one component of President Obama's comprehensive job creation package which he and the American people have been urging us in this Congress to pass. But my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the Republicans, have uniformly filibustered the President's comprehensive job creation package, so we are now attempting to debate the package in smaller legislative pieces. This week we are attempting to begin debate on the Rebuild America Jobs Act, which would put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work rebuilding our crumbling bridges, our roads, and our airports. It is an important bill. It is worthy of this Chamber's debate consideration. It should not be subject to another filibuster that leaves the American people wondering why the heck we cannot charter a path forward that would help create jobs and build our economy.

Before I specifically address what is in the Rebuild America Jobs Act, I thought it would be informative to briefly talk about how our economy got in the rough place it is in today. We are 3 years removed from a near global

economic meltdown. If you think about it, in the final year of the Bush administration we lost nearly 4.5 million jobs. That is very significant. Our economy was bleeding over 800,000 jobs a month when President Obama was sworn in. Credit markets were frozen, job losses mounted, and there was real concern that we as a nation risked slipping into another Great Depression. The Presiding Officer remembers all too well, as we all do, the concerns and the dynamics that were present at that point.

Fortunately, President Obama took a leadership role and the Congress worked with him to take steps to avert a catastrophe. But we are left with an enormous hole we are trying to climb out of. Beginning in 2009, we slowed the economic free fall that we passed and we put an end to the great recession--at least on paper. The Presiding Officer knows that. But, as typical of any recession, let alone the great recession, job growth has trailed economic growth.

Under the President's leadership, in the last year and a half, the economy has added nearly 2 million jobs. We are nearly halfway restoring the jobs lost under the Bush recession. Yet with unemployment standing at 9.1 percent nationwide, we still have a long way to go.

As I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, in order to speed up economic recovery and bring down this stubborn unemployment rate, the President presented to us a few months ago an ambitious job creation package called the American Jobs Act. The bill, which consisted of bipartisan proposals, as we well know, proposals that both parties had supported time and time again, ran into a wall of uncooperative partisanship in this Chamber and was grounded by a Republican filibuster.

Mr. President, you and I both adhere to the concept of bipartisanship, working with the other party, but this kind of obstructionism has become way too common in the modern Senate and it truly is getting in the way of our capacity, our desire to create jobs. I say that in a plain and simple way. It has put in jeopardy our future, frankly. We have to win a global economic race. We have traded the burden of governing--I should say also the responsibility of governing and legislating--for seemingly a set of ideological positions and gamesmanship, and you know and I know Coloradoans are flat out tired of it. They want their elected leaders to lead, to work across the aisle and produce some results that will help working Americans, will help small businesses.

I could not agree more with our citizens at home. I have to say that I think impartial observers would say with regularity, tea party interests in the Congress have taken our economy, have walked our economy, driven our economy to the edge of a cliff with the repeated threats of a government shutdown. If I could use the words of my colleague from Colorado: Can you imagine a city government leader allowing Denver, for example, to forfeit and default on its financial obligations? It would not happen. It feels as though we are creating in this Congress crises out of thin air, to rattle our economic markets.

You do not have to look back to August, to those dark days when the debate over the debt ceiling and then threat of default was an economic crisis completely of this element's own making. Then what followed? What was predicted to follow: Our credit was downgraded and it had economic effects.

I have been meeting with businesspeople this week who can give you example after example. I was a businessman in the private sector. My colleague from Colorado was. We know the Federal Government can only do so much to grow jobs and positively affect the economy. But when you have self-inflicted wounds, such as those that were produced in August, you are going to stifle recovery and you are going to create real business uncertainty in the private sector.

If we were serious about economic recovery, we would stop taking the Federal budget to the brink of disaster at every opportunity. I know there are people in this town who want to score points, but hard-working Americans, hard-working Coloradoans, and our businesses ultimately pay the price for this kind of increased uncertainty. If we were serious about providing businesses, particularly small businesses, with the capital they need, we would look for opportunities to do so.

One of the ways I believe the Senate could help would be to consider and pass a bipartisan piece of legislation that I have introduced now in a series of Congresses that will double the amount of loans credit unions can offer to small businesses.

This would literally help tens of thousands of Americans. It would allow businesspeople to create jobs for hundreds of thousands of Americans and there would be no cost to the American taxpayer. This is a form of lifting a regulation. Credit unions are overly regulated and this simple change in the policy that applies to their access to the small business sector would make a difference.

Instead--and this pains me to say--what I hear from the other side of the aisle, what my Republican colleagues offer are proposals that rely almost entirely on attacking the administration or suggesting that we implement the failed policies that got us into this situation in the past. This is one area where the commonsense rules that protect our consumers and preserve our clean air and our clean water are designated as the problem. There is, frankly, scant evidence to support their regulatory boogeymen. They offer no hard evidence of these claims. I am convinced the constant drumbeat about regulations is more harmful to our country's job creation potential than the alleged effect of the regulations themselves.

In fact, a recent Bloomberg study noted that this administration has issued 5 percent fewer regulations than the Bush administration at the same juncture. Economic data shows that these regulations have a minor effect, if at all, on the economy. I have in hand studies that show the right kinds of regulations, particularly when it comes to protecting the public's health, that actually can create jobs. The Assistant Secretary of Economic Policy at the Department of the Treasury recently wrote: ``None of these data support the claim that regulatory uncertainty is holding back hiring.''

On the contrary, she found that a lack of demand in the market and global financial and economic conditions are the primary culprits for our slow recovery.

This jives with what we hear generally from business leaders who, by large margins, point to a lack of demand and uncertainty in the marketplace as the primary barriers to their businesses, not Federal regulation. What feeds this uncertainty and lack of demand is the constant political threats to send our economy off a cliff and the constant scare campaign that tells Americans to fear the Obama administration.

I am not unsympathetic to the plight of the regulated sectors of our economy. President Obama said it well. He said: ``We should have no more regulation than the health, safety, and security of the American people require,'' and we should make compliance with the ones we do have as easy as possible. I don't want to overstate this, but that is why I have taken steps to eliminate unnecessary Federal redtape, such as easing the cap on how much credit unions can loan to small businesses. But to constantly spread fear about our Government's work to provide oversight and protect clean air and clean water is a further uncertainty and worsen the lack of demand we see in the economy.

To break through this nonsense--and I don't use this word lightly--this ``nonsense'' about the effect regulations are having, President Obama has offered a real path forward based on sound economics and bipartisan ideas. The Rebuild America Jobs Act was introduced yesterday. As I said, it is a part of the President's overall comprehensive approach. I hope we can move to debate this important infrastructure bill.

We are going to have a vote tomorrow morning, I believe, that would allow the Senate to move to actually debating the bill, and it would significantly and immediately boost job creation across the country. We would be able to ensure that we keep our roads and our bridges and other infrastructure safe, while investing in new projects that will stimulate businesses to invest and begin to create new, good-paying, American-based jobs, the type of jobs that cannot be shipped overseas. The American people, without question, overwhelmingly support the ideas in this projobs bill. It is all about investing in the future of hard-working Americans and making sure they have the tools to achieve the American dream.

In Colorado alone, the investments for highway and transit projects in the bill are estimated to support the creation of at least 6,400 local jobs. We would accept those jobs in a minute. We know those people. We know the construction sector is one of the ones languishing in our State. These are trained, committed Coloradans who are dying to improve our State, to improve our infrastructure, to improve our economy. Why is that important beyond our State or beyond our country? We cannot compete if we do not have the infrastructure that allows commercial activity to thrive. That has been one of our competitive advantages for decades. Our competitors are not sitting back and waiting for us. They are investing in their infrastructure now. We don't have to go any further than China, India, Africa, South America. Those countries and continents are investing in their infrastructure.

What was heartening is that recently we have seen a great coalition, one that maybe we could mirror in the Congress, to support the President's proposal. That is the AFL-CIO, the leading labor organization in the United States that speaks for all the various unions across our country, allied with business interests such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These are diverse interests. They are often at loggerheads. They have come together to urge us to pass such a measure that would build America.

The bill will not solve all our infrastructure challenges. It will not respond to every infrastructure opportunity we have. For example, we ought to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. That is another less-than-valiant effort we made this year. As the Presiding Officer knows, we left in August with the FAA not funded and that cost us some economic growth. It put people out of work. Even for a week or two, that was too much time to be out of work. We ought to fully reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration and in the process upgrade our national system of air travel.

I served in the House. I worked on the NextGen concept, which would upgrade the way in which we direct airplanes to travel across our country using satellite technology. Now we use radar technology. That is a 20th century technology. We need a 21st century technology. So let's pass a full authorization of the Federal Aviation Administration. We ought to pass a robust highway bill. For too long we have not had the full funding and full direction on a robust highway bill. I wish to applaud the bipartisan work that has gone into that. Senators Boxer, Inhofe, and Vitter have

taken the first steps on a bipartisan proposal to do just that.

I note that many of my Republican colleagues object to the Rebuild America Jobs Act on the grounds that we would pay for it with additional revenue from those who make annually more than $1 million. I wish to point out that the American people disagree with them. Polls show close to 70 percent of Americans support offsetting the costs of the bill--because we are going to pay for this. We heard that message loudly and clearly; that those who make over $1 million a year could help shoulder more of the burden. I know I talked to people who have done quite well at home in Colorado who are willing to make that kind of investment if they see the return on the investment. The American people are ahead of us on this. They know it is a matter of simple fairness.

If I were in an ideal world--therefore, I am running the show--I would make some changes to the bill to address our broader infrastructure challenges. I would fold in the FAA; I would fold in the highway bill I mentioned. But let's take the first modest step. Let's open the floor of the Senate to debate on the Rebuild America Jobs Act just like the American Jobs Act more generally. We could discuss how to pay for it and what are the best mechanisms. Perhaps there is another way to pay for it, but let's begin the process.

I wish to close by focusing on our home State of Colorado. I return home, as the Chair does, almost every weekend and take the time to hear out my fellow citizens and those who hired me to represent them in the Senate. They will briefly complain about our inability to get things done, as we know, even the simplest things it seems like this year. I know my colleagues have similar experiences. But they quickly move to what they are doing at home and how they are making their lives better. I get energized by their commitment to working in their own communities. The other thing I don't hear much at home is a litmus test as to what political party we are a member of or what their concerns are about who is up for reelection next year. They come together all across our State, in Alamosa and Durango and Grand Junction, Sterling, and the list goes on and on of communities that come together. That isn't to say there isn't disagreement or that the solution comes easy, but they don't deal in the kind of partisan bickering that has become so common here.

I know the Presiding Officer feels that sense of possibility at home. So let's match that sense of possibility. Let's match their energy. We can take some heart from the fact that our economy is beginning to show some signs of improvement.

The Department of Commerce report showed a 2.5-percent growth in Gross Domestic Product. That is welcomed news and signals that we are slowly making progress. I want to underline unemployment remains stubbornly, maddeningly high at 9.1 percent. We must do better. I hope we can start by a minimum voting tomorrow to at least debate the Rebuild America Jobs Act.

Let's end the filibusters, particularly when it comes to starting a debate. Literally, we are not even going to debate this bill. If we were to open the debate tomorrow, in a few days' time, we would have to have an additional cloture vote to end debate on the vote itself. If the minority and my Republican colleagues don't want to move to end debate, they certainly have that option at that time.

Let's keep faith with the description of the Senate, which was one of my motivations for wanting to represent Coloradans here, which is the most deliberative legislative body in the world. If we are the Chamber that many look to for debate, for time spent to understand the best policies for the country, let's keep faith with that. Let's keep faith with our obligations as Senators. So the time for filibusters is over. Let's go to work on behalf of the American people.

I remain optimistic. I think we can bring forth creativity and a sense of cooperation. That is what we see at home. That is what happens in Colorado. That is what happens in all the States that are represented here. That is the American way. Let's bring the American way to the Senate and put Americans back to work.

I thank the Chair for his patience, his interest, his partnership, his service to the State of Colorado and the United States itself.

I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source