Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, as every Member of Congress knows, Americans are hurting, and after 5 1/2 years of the Obama economy, they are getting pretty discouraged, as a recent CNN poll reported.

That ``pessimism,'' Erin Currier, director of the Economic Mobility Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts, stated in a recent CNNMoney article, ``is reflective of the financial realities a lot of families are facing. They are treading water, but their income is not translating into solid financial security.''

Unfortunately, Senate Democrats have responded to the economic instability facing so many Americans by essentially doing nothing. Instead of legislation to create jobs and expand opportunity, Democrats have tied up the Senate this year with politically motivated show votes designed to go nowhere.

Back in March the New York Times reported that Democrats planned to spend the spring and summer on messaging votes ``timed to coincide with campaign-style trips by President Obama.''

The Times reported:

..... Democrats concede that making new laws is not really the point. Rather, they are trying to force Republicans to vote against them.

Democrats have certainly been following that playbook. This week, in their latest election-year political stunt, they will take up a designed-to-fail student loan bill. According to plan, it will be accompanied by some ``campaign-style'' stops by President Obama.

The Democrats' bill would do nothing to make college more affordable or reduce the amount of money students have to borrow, and it would do nothing to address the real problem facing recent college graduates; that is, the lack of jobs.

The Democrats' student loan bill would provide some former students with old loans a taxpayer subsidy which, based on Congressional Research data, would be worth about $1 a day. To provide this, their bill would raise income taxes by $72 billion.

Meanwhile, Democrats have conveniently ignored the fact that student loan repayment plans that could lower monthly payments by more than their proposal are already available to all students with Federal loans.

Republicans have student debt solutions, such as simplifying the student loan process so more students can take advantage of the affordable repayment options that already exist in current law, but young Americans need a lot more than student debt solutions. The best thing we can do for graduates is to help create jobs.

Young people in particular are suffering in the Obama economy. The current unemployment rate for those 16 to 24 years old is 13.2 percent--more than twice the national average. Unemployment among those 16 to 34 years old is 9.2 percent--significantly higher than the overall unemployment rate of 6.3 percent. Nationally, 6.1 million 18- to 24-year-olds are living below the poverty line, and 36 percent of young adults are living at home with their parents.

It is no wonder that CNNMoney reports that ``young adults, age 18 to 34, are most likely to feel the [American] dream is unattainable.''

What young people need is not a government subsidy but access to jobs, good-paying, full-time jobs with the opportunity for advancement, but those jobs are few and far between in the Obama economy.

While young people may be having the hardest time finding jobs, no one in the Obama economy is doing well. Nationwide, nearly 10 million Americans are unemployed, almost one-third of them for 6 months or longer.

The unemployment rate has hovered at recession-level highs for the entire Obama Presidency. Since the President took office, the average length of unemployment has increased from 19.8 weeks to 34.5 weeks. Approximately 14 million Americans have been forced to join the Food Stamp Program since President Obama took office, bringing the total number of Americans receiving food stamps to more than 46 million.

Meanwhile, everywhere families look prices are going up. Gas prices have almost doubled during the Obama Presidency. Food prices have increased, and the President's policies are just making things worse. Chief among the President's policy disasters, of course, is ObamaCare, which has driven up the price of everything from premiums to pacemakers.

The President told the American people his health care law would drive down health care premiums by $2,500. Instead, prices have risen by almost $3,700, and they are still going up.

ObamaCare has meant new burdens for just about everyone: higher premiums and deductibles, more expensive medications, fewer doctors and hospitals from which to choose, lost jobs, and increased taxes on businesses both large and small. Millions of Americans were forced off their health plans--the plans they were promised they could keep--and into the health exchanges, where they were frequently forced to pay more for plans they liked less.

Not content with the high health care bills, now the President is adding insult to injury by putting in place EPA regulations that will drive up electricity bills for all American families. The President's de facto energy tax will hit low-income families and seniors on fixed incomes the hardest. It will also slash tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of jobs. Coal plants will close, leaving their workers unemployed, and manufacturers will send jobs in America overseas to countries with more affordable energy.

The worst part is that President Obama's EPA regulations will devastate family budgets and the economy for nothing because the President's proposals will do almost nothing to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. As long as our country is acting unilaterally, there will be no meaningful effect on global emissions, but the President is pressing on anyway and apparently Americans will have to get used to their massive new energy bills.

The President's policies are having a devastating effect on American students, families, and the middle class, but instead of trying to make things better, the Democratic leadership in the Senate has chosen to take up gimmicky legislation, not to help Americans but to get Democrats reelected.

Yesterday a bipartisan veterans bill, which would address the systemwide VA crisis, was introduced in the Senate. The failures at the VA are a national embarrassment and a betrayal of our compact with our veterans. Congress has an obligation to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Today we could be discussing the best ways to fix our VA system. Instead, we are going to be discussing a bill designed not to improve things for Americans but to win the Democrats a few votes. Instead of proceeding to a student loan bill that was designed to fail, we should proceed directly to the VA reform bill.

The House of Representatives acted decisively to bring greater accountability to the VA 3 weeks ago. Today they are moving forward on a VA reform bill that includes many of the provisions of the bill that was introduced in the Senate last night. Now that we have a bipartisan VA reform bill in the Senate, we should be acting with the same sense of urgency.

If Democratic leaders in the Senate truly wanted to make things better for American families, they wouldn't be focused on gimmicky show votes. Instead, they would be working with Republicans to fix the VA crisis. They would back a repeal of the ObamaCare medical device tax, which has already cost tens of thousands of jobs and will cost many more if it isn't repealed. They would support Republican efforts to repeal the ObamaCare 30-hour workweek rule, which has resulted in lost hours and decreased wages for way too many workers in this country, and they would embrace legislation to halt the devastating EPA rules the President has proposed and protect millions of American families from crippling energy bills.

They would push--they would push for job-creating measures such as the Keystone XL Pipeline and the 42,000 jobs it would support or trade promotion authority for the President to open new markets to American farmers, workers, and businesses, and create those good-paying jobs.

We throw around a lot of statistics in the Congress--1 million people this, 10 million people that. It is important for us to remember the faces behind the numbers: the parents trying to figure out how they will afford to pay both their daughters' tuition and their new ObamaCare premiums, the college graduate who can't find a job and is currently living in his parents' basement, the single mother whose working hours have suddenly been cut because her employer can't afford to pay the ObamaCare mandate, a father who has been out of a job for months and can't get an interview anywhere.

These Americans need help, and the President's policies are not helping. The good thing is it doesn't have to stay that way. We can get America working again, but it is going to take something different than the policies of the last 5 1/2 years.

I challenge my Democratic colleagues to join us in passing real jobs legislation, the kind of legislation that will open a future of opportunity and economic security for all American families.

What college graduates don't need are political gimmicks. What college graduates need more than anything else are good-paying jobs with opportunities for advancement. That is what we should be focused on, not political show votes, not election-year sloganeering but real meaningful policies that will grow and expand our economy in this country and create the good-paying jobs our young college graduates need and that will lift more lower income families into the middle class.

That is what this Senate ought to be focused on. We can change to that focus, and we can start doing some things that will make this country stronger and provide a better and more prosperous and a more secure future for middle-income families.

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

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