Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2013 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. First, Mr. President, let me rise to commend Senator Murray for her extraordinary leadership on the Budget Committee and in so many other ways in the Senate. She did a remarkable job in bringing together a budget that responds to the urgent need we see in the United States today to create jobs, to strengthen the economic recovery and, in fact, to provide more momentum to this recovery, much more.

In my State of Rhode Island, despite certain gains, we are still at roughly 9 percent unemployment. This is unacceptable. We have to do more.

The first step on that path is to move this budget to conference. That is what Senator Murray has spoken about, and that is what is so critical. Fifty-three days ago, under her leadership, the Senate passed a budget. The budget invested $100 billion in a targeted jobs and infrastructure package that would start creating new jobs quickly. And that is what my constituents need. Indeed, when I go back to Rhode Island that is what people are asking about: Where are the jobs?

The budget would begin, in this jobs and infrastructure package, to repair public roads, bridges, and help prepare workers for the 21st century. All of these things are essential to our present economic need for job creation, our future productivity, and our future ability to compete in an increasingly competitive global economy. Our budget path, as laid out by Senator Murray, would end the economically damaging sequester and make the tough and balanced choices we need for sound fiscal policies.

Now the House Republicans also passed a budget. The next step in regular order is to go to conference. Admittedly, the House Republican budget stands in stark contrast to our budget, and it is clear we have a lot of work to do to reach an agreement. For example, the House Republican budget calls for a total of $4.6 trillion in cuts, it voucherizes Medicare, it would leave the sequester in place, and it calls for tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest Americans.

I believe these and other choices in the House Republican budget would be a very bad deal for the people of Rhode Island. These are the kinds of differences that must be and can only be resolved effectively in conference. Again, the first step to do that is to appoint our conferees, to go to conference, and to begin the difficult discussions and negotiations to provide the American public the answers they are looking for.

So it is past time we move to conference with the House. And I hope there is a real chance that Senate and House Democrats can negotiate a bipartisan agreement with our Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives, and with our Republican colleagues in the Senate that will move the country forward.

Unfortunately, despite the insistence over months and months and months by Republicans in the House and in the Senate that we go to regular order, that we pass a budget--that was the biggest problem they were talking about for many months, last year and the year before. Now here we are looking for regular order, and they are looking the other way and block us from moving forward and conferencing the Senate and House budgets. That can't go on. We have to get to conference. We have to take the next step.

We can't delay. We have 11.7 million Americans out of work and looking for jobs. We have to address the sequester.

As Senator Murray just said, yesterday the Secretary of Defense announced hundreds of thousands of civilian personnel will be furloughed, civilian personnel that support from our military forces. That will not only disrupt their lives, which is the first great toll, but it will also disrupt the efficiency and the ability of the Department of Defense to fully and capably carry out its mission. These are critical issues.

We have to make sure, again, that the full faith and credit of the United States is not jeopardized by another manufactured crisis over the debt ceiling, which is once again on the horizon.

We have to deal very soon with all of these issues. The logical and appropriate step is to go to conference. We have a lot of work to do.

Let me also say I am encouraged that I have heard that Leader Reid is prepared to call up for a vote the nomination of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is critical because a well-regulated marketplace is not only good for consumers, it is good for companies. That is something that could add to this economic recovery, this certainty, this knowledge that consumers will have the information they need.

Also, I presume and hope that very soon we will have a vote with respect to the pending doubling of the student loan interest rate. Last year we avoided this by pushing it forward a year. We have another deadline facing us July 1. We have to make sure students don't face another crippling increase in interest rates they pay on student loans.

Student loans are a huge burden on the generations that are coming up. In fact, it could delay our economic progress by a decade or more as students can't buy homes and form households because they are saddled with the debt. So we have to work on that too. We just can't lurch from crisis to crisis.

The first thing to do, the immediate thing we should do, is to invoke regular order. Let's go ahead, let's go to conference. Let's start dealing with the issues that affect the people of America. Let's start serving their primary concerns--creating jobs and a stable economy--and doing that through regular order and the procedures that we have adopted and used for decades.

I yield the floor.

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