Jobs for America Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, House Republicans are shutting down this House early today, and they are shutting it down with the same happy talk and tax cut hocus pocus that they began this Congress with 21 months ago, last January.

That is when Speaker Boehner reserved H. Res. 1 for a form of Miracle-Gro. They were going to sprinkle around Miracle-Gro tax cuts--more special interest tax breaks on everyone--and they would grow money faster than it could grow on trees. They have given us so much talk and so many press conferences about how they would do away with all of these complex special interest provisions that Republicans have spent years writing into law for their buddies--into their Tax Code--and we would all have brighter smiles and, certainly, fatter wallets. All of that joy, all of those wonders, would be accomplished debt free. We wouldn't have to borrow another dime from the Chinese or the Saudis or from whoever would lend it to us. We would get all that and more with their proposal.

Unfortunately, their old time medicine show started brightly, but it fizzled out rather quickly.

No Democrat stood in the way of their introducing and voting in the Ways and Means Committee on a tax cut Miracle-Gro elixir. There is no reason they couldn't have brought it out here on the floor on any day the Speaker wanted to consider Miracle-Gro. Yet we are here today, closing out, and H. Res. 1 says on the Republican Web site that it is still reserved for the Speaker, as is most attention to any major issue in this country reserved, because these folks don't want to work here in Washington. Instead, we get to this sorry bill today that is before us that provides more debt, more complexity, and more sweetheart deals.

When we consider the difficult budget choices, Republicans claim that we just don't have enough money. As much as they would like to provide full funding for Alzheimer's research, for cancer, for multiple sclerosis, for diabetes, for Parkinson's, we just don't have the money. We would like to do more to prevent the many forest fires that are spreading across the country--wildfires of all types--and provide the National Weather Service better funding to deal with the dramatic changes in our climate and our weather, but we just don't have the money to do that.

And what about our roads and bridges? We can't figure out a way to fund them, even to this time next year, because we just don't have the money.

Yes, we would like each child to be able to accomplish their full, God-given potential, but we just can't afford to fund from pre-K to post grad. But somehow we can afford more Miracle-Gro today--$500 billion taken right out of the debt, added to the debt.

I am for--and I know the gentleman is for--a pro-growth, pro-job creation set of government policies that focus on workforce development, on having the research in medicine and technology not only to find cures but to produce another round of jobs.

If we lack the Federal resources to do that, we certainly don't have the Federal resources today to hand out one bonus after another, as their bill does, to corporations with special interest provisions that will ultimately fail our economy.

This bill that we have does everything that they said their tax elixir would not do. It borrows money from many to give money to a few who already have the most. This represents the first installment in new national debt, a big chunk of the more than $1 trillion that these Republicans told us they wouldn't bury us in, but they proposed the first big installment today. They continue a Tax Code that is riddled with special interest tax preferences and giveaways while making a bonus depreciation provision that even failed as a temporary stimulus measure.

The only jobs that this bill is really designed to protect--and the reason that it is here right now before they rush to the airport--are the jobs of the Republican Members of this House of Representatives, and they sure do a good job of trying to accomplish that.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

We ought to reject this package that is motivated solely by a looming election for a Republican majority whose biggest contributions to job creation in America have cost us dearly. They stand steadfast against the proposal that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one business group after another tells us will grow this economy--that is immigration reform--because they can't overcome the Know Nothings within their party who stand against the reform that we know would grow so many jobs.

Of course, their major accomplishment that they can point to right now out of this Congress was when they put the country on Cruz control, and it cost us $24 billion in economic growth. Reject this bill.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source