Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Before we can have a real debate on how to fix the U.S. economy, which is experiencing the slowest recovery following a recession of any time since World War II, we have to agree on what the problem is and what we are actually trying to solve.

On this side of the aisle, we believe the problem is a shortage of full-time jobs, and we believe our main economic priority should be to facilitate or to create circumstances under which the private sector can create more full-time jobs. That is why we have offered a series of amendments to the pending legislation that would help do that. It would help grow the economy and help get people back to work--not just pay people who are, unfortunately, unemployed but actually help create jobs so they can find work and help provide for their families, which is what the vast majority of people want to do.

Currently, we have pending about 70 different amendments from this side of the aisle that would actually improve the underlying legislation. Among other things, our amendments would repeal job-killing taxes, improve congressional safeguards against overregulation, and restore the traditional 40-hour workweek, which is a particular subject of concern to organized labor, which recently sent a letter to the White House and said that ObamaCare was incentivizing employers to take full-time work and make it part-time work. They called it a nightmare.

We also need to modernize our work-training programs. I have traveled to a number of locations in Texas, for example, where, as a result of the shale gas renaissance, we have had a number of manufacturing companies move back onshore because of this inexpensive energy supply, creating thousands of new jobs, and there are thousands more to come.

Thank goodness our community colleges are working with industry in these areas because what we find is that when people graduate from high school or maybe even college, they don't necessarily have the skills to qualify for these good, high-paying jobs. If there is one aspect we ought to all be able to agree on, it is that we need to modernize our work-training programs so that we can help people gain those skills so they can earn a good income as a result.

We also need to expedite natural gas exports, and that is not only for economic reasons and job-creating reasons at home.

We have seen Russia using natural gas--and the stranglehold it has on Ukraine--as a weapon. One of the things we can do to help the people of Ukraine and to help our allies in Europe is to provide a long-term source of energy through another route other than through Russian pipelines.

We also should approve the Keystone XL Pipeline, which will complete this pipeline from Canada all the way across the United States. The terminus would be in southeast Texas, where that oil would be refined into gasoline and jet fuel and create a lot of jobs in the process. Then we need to consider proposals that would incentivize American businesses, small and large, to hire veterans.

I have been discussing these amendments all week, and I have been calling on the majority leader to allow these amendments to come to the floor and to provide an opportunity for a vote. As I said, there are now currently more than 70 different amendments and ideas that have been filed that are just waiting on the majority leader, who is the one who basically has complete discretion over whether or not those votes will actually occur. We have been imploring him to allow a vote on these amendments, but it appears--and I don't know if there is really any other conclusion you can draw--the majority leader has a different priority. His top priority, it appears, is for show votes on bills that either aren't going to go anywhere, because they are not going to be taken up by the House of Representatives, or that really treat the symptom rather than solve the underlying problem.

As we read in the New York Times and elsewhere, it is the intention of the majority leader and the Democratic leadership in the Senate to schedule a series of show votes that basically are designed to change the subject from the failed policies of this administration--notably ObamaCare. Of course, one of those is going to be to make it easier for the trial bar to file class action lawsuits when it comes to gender pay disparity, something that is already against the law. The majority leader and his allies are going to lift the cap on damages and subject small and large businesses alike to class action lawsuits.

You don't have to take my word for it. All you have to do is read the New York Times. Here is what they reported last week:

The proposals have little chance of passing. But Democrats concede that making new laws is not really the point. Rather, they are trying to force Republicans to vote against them.

For that matter, the majority leader himself has acknowledged that these ideas were developed in collaboration with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the political arm of our Democrat friends in the Senate.

So it is pretty clear what is happening here. This is not a majority leader--or a majority, for that matter--in search of solutions to the problems that plague our country, particularly slow economic growth and high joblessness, and the highest percentage of people who have dropped out of the workforce since World War II. This has nothing to do with helping the American people. What it does have to do with is making proposals that would actually make the economy worse.

For example, the Congressional Budget Office said the proposed minimum wage increase--a 40-percent increase in the minimum wage--would likely destroy 1/2 million to 1 million jobs because the money has to come from somewhere. Small businesses, if they are going to be forced to pay 40 percent more for their workforce, are going to have to cut somewhere else, and what they are going to cut is jobs.

Needless to say, notwithstanding the fact that we are seeing the majority leader and the majority party engaged in pure political posturing, what they are actually proposing is going to make things worse, not better.

There is also the so-called Paycheck Fairness Act, which really should be called the ``Trial Lawyers Bonanza'' bill. This is nothing more than a gift to the trial bar. As I said earlier, gender-based pay discrimination was outlawed a half century ago. It is illegal already. President Obama, more recently, signed something called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act just a few days after taking office in January of 2009. Here is what he said at that time. In 2009, he said that the Ledbetter act ``ensures equal pay for equal work.''

If that is true--and I believe it is--then why offer this additional legislation, unless it is purely a political exercise designed to posture and perhaps distract people from the things they are upset about, such as ObamaCare, leading into the midterm elections. We are now being told that unless we pass the so-called Paycheck Fairness Act, or the ``Trial Lawyer Giveaway,'' employers will be able to discriminate against women. Well, that is nonsense. That is not true. I don't know how you can say it any more strongly other than to call it the lie that it is.

Even before the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act equal pay for equal work has been the law of the land since the 1960s. As the Wall Street Journal once observed, the Paycheck Fairness Act should really be called the ``Trial Lawyer Paycheck Act'' because that is who would benefit from this bill were it to become the law of the land.

Of course, as I mentioned a moment ago, the majority leader doesn't really expect this to pass. It is part of this false narrative we have heard before, and we are going to hear it again, that somehow this is really about fairness and gender discrimination, when it is about nothing of the kind. It is solely about politics. It really is a cynical attempt to distract people from what are the most important things we could do as a Senate, which is, again, to create circumstances under which the economy would grow and jobs would be created by the private sector so people could find work and they could provide for their families. That is what we ought to be doing.

Our Democratic friends claim this political agenda they announced last week, in conjunction with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is all about giving Americans a fair shot. Yet the majority leader is refusing to give them a fair shot at finding a full-time job, and he is refusing to give my constituents in Texas--26 million of them--an opportunity to get some of their ideas heard and voted on on the Senate Floor.

As I said once, and I will say it again, there are more than 70 different amendments that have been filed to this underlying legislation that would actually provide a solution rather than a political stunt which will do nothing to solve the underlying problem. The purpose of these amendments is to help millions of people who remain unemployed or underemployed, including the 3.8 million Americans who have been unemployed for more than 6 months--3.8 million Americans out of work for more than 6 months.

This legislation does nothing to help those people, other than perhaps to help pay them for a period of time they are continuing unsuccessfully to find work. There are also 7.2 million Americans who are working part-time who would like to work full time.

If the majority leader wants to argue our amendments are a bad idea, let him do it. We will have that debate on the merits. If he wants to promote alternative options for growing the economy and creating jobs, we will be happy to consider those and perhaps even agree with him on some of them. But to simply refuse to allow a vote on these 70-some-odd amendments is a profound insult, not to us but to our constituents and the millions of Americans who continue to suffer through the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression.

We can do better. We need to do better. The American people deserve better than this cheap political stunt.

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