Make It In America

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Thank you Representative Tonko. I want to associate myself with all the comments from my great colleague, Marcy Kaptur.

Mr. Speaker, I can tell you, when I was elected to Congress, no one could have paid me to believe that we would be on this floor fighting the Republican Party to prevent them from basically neutering the economic progress of business here. And this is what has happened.

As the gentlewoman from Ohio just mentioned, GE, very close to my district, announced plans to leave our region, 350 jobs and 400 suppliers that they have notified that they are moving their facility plants to Canada. They say that the suppliers generate almost $47 million in revenue in Wisconsin alone--$47 million in Wisconsin alone. But they are leaving, they say, because they desperately cannot make the deals work without financing from the Export-Import Bank.

And many people have said, oh, they wanted to do this anyway and they are using it as an excuse, but GE says that this is the main reason, that they continue to urge Congress to reauthorize the Ex-Im Bank because it is a very, very competitive world. And in a slow growth and volatile world, they have got to go where the markets are; they have got to compete in 170 countries.

And so I just wanted to express my grief, my condolences, to the 350 employees, to the entire supply chain, and to recognize that once again--once again--policies of this misguided Republican majority are going to increase the misery index among the people who live in my region.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source