Tax Extenders Act of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I rise today, and while I am speaking as in morning business, it is actually speaking in support of the legislation the chairman of the Finance Committee talked about, just taking it in a slightly different direction.

We spend a lot of time talking in this body about the necessity for us to focus on jobs and how Americans feel about that search for jobs. We read about unemployment numbers at 9.7 percent. While we say, with some relief, the numbers did not pop up during February, those numbers are still way too high.

I had a personal experience--I was not planning on speaking on the Senate floor, but I wanted to share with my colleagues and others an event that happened--actually is still happening--about 45 minutes south of this Chamber.

My office had decided to sponsor a jobs fair, where we would bring together more than 30 Federal agencies. We located this jobs fair down 45 minutes, as I mentioned, south of here at the University of Mary Washington at their Stafford campus.

For those who do not follow all of the ins and outs of Northern Virginia, we are blessed in Northern Virginia and Virginia overall with actually a rather low unemployment rate. Statewide our unemployment is about 7 percent, and in Northern Virginia our numbers are even much lower.

As I mentioned, we put together this jobs fair, not unlike what the Chair has done or other Senators have done. We were well represented with over 30 Federal agencies--from TSA to the Peace Corps to the Fish and Wildlife Service. We put out the word, not knowing exactly what kind of response we would get. This is the first jobs fair I have hosted as a U.S. Senator.

At first we were a little worried. Last week, last Wednesday we only had about 75 RSVPs for this jobs fair on a college campus south of Washington. But by that Friday night we had almost 3,000 folks signed up. By yesterday afternoon, we realized, oh, my gosh, our numbers were topping out about 5,000, and we were warning people that perhaps all of the accommodations we put in place were not ready to handle this many folks. We extended the hours of the jobs fair from noon to 12 to actually 4 o'clock today.

When my staff started showing up this morning about 6:30 or 7, there were 500 people waiting in cars, many of whom had been sleeping there for hours. By 9 o'clock, when the jobs fair was supposed to start, 3,000 people were in line. I showed up there about 9:30, and, regrettably, before noon, we had topped out over 5,000, probably closer to 7,000 folks clogging the roads trying to come to this jobs fair in Stafford County, VA.

Unfortunately, we had to cut it off at that point and put out the word that we would try to have another jobs fair with these Federal agencies and some private sector partners within the next few weeks. The response was overwhelming.

As I mentioned earlier, I spent an hour simply going up and down the line of folks who were waiting. Many of these folks were people who had graduate degrees; almost all of them had college degrees. They looked like any of the kind of workforce we would see crossing any parts of our Nation's Capital today.

I heard story after story of folks who had never ever expected to show up at a Federal jobs fair, folks who had never ever expected to see their lives turned topsy-turvy by unemployment, or by folks who were still unable to change jobs because of their constraints on health care.

None of these folks were looking for a handout. They were just looking for that opportunity to talk with some of the 35-plus representatives from Federal agencies about the possibilities of getting a job. All they wanted to do was try to do a better job for themselves and their families.

So as we return to the debate on the so-called tax extenders bill, and when we work, as I know I have with the Presiding Officer, on efforts to kind of free up credit for small business owners or when we talk about how we can provide other kinds of incentives with the private sector to jumpstart the economy, while it was great to provide the possibility of these jobs in the public sector, the vast majority of jobs will and should be created in the private sector.

As we think about this piece of legislation right now, to make sure our Tax Code is supportive enough of those private sector efforts, I saw the reason for those efforts this morning in the thousands in one of the most prosperous parts of our country, in Northern Virginia.

I came back more charged up than ever that what we do here is terribly important and that the folks there in that line didn't understand rules about filibusters or holds or all the other procedural back and forth that sometimes seems to dominate the floor. What they did want us to do was to put that aside, put our partisanship aside and get the job done of trying to create more and more jobs all across the country. It is my hope in the coming weeks, when we have the next jobs fair, we will have the same kind of response. I look forward to the day, hopefully in the not too distant future, when we have a jobs fair, whether it be in Virginia or in Minnesota, that we get a few folks but that we don't get overwhelmed with the kind of literally unprecedented number of the 7,000 folks we saw today.

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

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