Providing for Consideration of H.R. 3495, Women's Public Health and Safety Act, and Waiving A Requirement of Clause 6(A) of Rule Xiii With Respect to Consideration of Certain Resolutions Reported from the Committee on Rules
Floor Speech
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the previous question so that this House may finally get on with the important work of supporting American jobs by reauthorizing the charter of the Export-Import Bank.
My friends on the opposite side of the aisle claim that they support business. They claim they support small business. They claim that this is something that is not paid enough attention to. Yet when we have the opportunity to support the Ex-Im Bank, what do they do? They turn it into a political question because they want to use it to divide.
Let me tell you some facts about the Ex-Im Bank.
The Ex-Im Bank supported $27.4 billion of U.S. exports at no cost to American taxpayers; 164,000 American jobs were supported. Nearly 90 percent of Ex-Im Bank transactions directly supported small businesses. There was a $675 million surplus generated for American taxpayers in funding year 2014 alone.
Ex-Im Bank's mission is American jobs. By financing the export of American goods and services, Ex-Im Bank has supported $1.3 million private sector, American jobs since 2009, supporting, again, 164,000 jobs in funding year 2014 alone.
So, Mr. Speaker and Members, every day that this Republican-led House refuses to act is another day that American workers suffer the consequences.
It has been 3 months now since Republicans shut down our Nation's export credit agency, a vital financing tool that enables U.S. companies both large and small to compete for sales in the global marketplace, and businesses and their workers are feeling the pain.
The stories that we have received from across the Nation make the unfortunate consequences of the House Republicans' shutdown of the Ex-Im Bank distressingly clear. In describing the impact of the Ex-Im shutdown, the chief financial officer of Chief Industries, Incorporated, a Nebraska company that sells grain bins and elevators, said: ``We've lost business. That's the easiest way to put it. We can't get that business back.''
In my home State of California, the president of Combustion Associates, Incorporated, a power plant manufacturer, said that the shutdown of the Ex-Im Bank has put her small, woman- and minority-owned company at a ``real disadvantage,'' saying that, as a result of fierce competition from Chinese and European firms: ``If we don't get Ex-Im back soon, there's a very good chance we will lose three pending contracts to one of our competitors.''
In describing the devastating consequence of losing the support of the Ex-Im Bank, the owner of U.S. International Trading Corporation, based in Nevada, said that the ideologically charged debate surrounding the reauthorization ``is like being stabbed in the back by people who should be defending you.''
Steve Wilburn, a long-time Republican and former marine, who owns a renewable fuels company in Arizona that lost a major Philippines green energy project due to the uncertainty over Ex-Im's future, recently remarked: ``I never thought the day would come when the Republican Party would somehow view a small business like mine as crony capitalism.''
While these small businesses and many like them are unable to successfully compete internationally without the support of the Ex-Im Bank, some of our Nation's largest manufacturers are losing contracts as well, with significant negative downstream consequences for the small business suppliers that make up their vast U.S. supply chains.
Making matters worse, in recent weeks, large companies, including GE and Boeing, have announced that the lack of export credit financing from the Ex-Im Bank has forced those companies to move some of their manufacturing operations abroad, where export credit financing is readily available.
Mr. Speaker, we should be ashamed of this. We should be doing everything we can to grow jobs in this country and give U.S. businesses the tools they need to succeed.
I have said it before and will say it again, a majority of this House supports reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank; and if we don't give Members the opportunity to vote up or down on reopening the Bank's doors today, the self-inflicted shutdown of the Ex-Im Bank will continue to hurt workers and our economy. It is time to recognize the realities of the extremely competitive international marketplace that businesses must compete in.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. I don't know what they are afraid of. They like shutting things down.
You are going to shut down something in this country that is going to cause us to lose jobs.
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