Waiving Requirement of Clause 6(a) of RULE XIII with Respect to Consideration of Certain Resolutions and Providing for Consideration of Motions to Suspend the Rules

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, extending help to the unemployed is the right thing to do. It's the decent thing to do. We should have done it a long time ago. My colleagues on the Republican side have frustrated attempt after attempt after attempt after attempt to extend these benefits to people, most of whom have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

My friends on the other side of the aisle say, well, we can't afford to do it, that we need to pay for this, even though they are emergency benefits. Well, why don't we pay for the Bush tax cuts, which added hundreds of billions of dollars to our debt? Why don't we pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all funded through borrowed money? Why is nation building in Afghanistan more important than our own people? Why is giving Donald Trump another tax cut that is unpaid for, that adds to our deficit, more important than helping those who are unemployed?

I ask my friends on the other side of the aisle, What are you thinking? Why don't you care? Whose side are you on? I urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to leave the Beltway every once in a while and go back and talk to your own constituents, and you will see that people are struggling, that there are people who are suffering because of this economy.

This is a difficult economy that is slowly but surely beginning to recover. It is a difficult economy that President Obama inherited from George W. Bush. We are trying to dig ourselves out of this mess that my Republican friends have created. It's going to take time. I remind my friends on the other side of the aisle that when George Bush was President we were losing an average of nearly 750,000 jobs per month in the last 3 months of the administration.

Twenty-two consecutive months of job losses, that's what they gave us.

When they talk about the deficit, I remind them that President Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a record surplus that they squandered on tax cuts for the rich and two wars that were unpaid for.

And, you know, the reason why we talk about President Bush's record is because the head of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, Pete Sessions, when asked what the Republican plan was, he said, We need to go back to the exact same agenda: the exact same agenda that produced these record deficits, the exact same agenda that put millions of people in this country out of work. Now, I've heard a lot of scary things in this Chamber, but I've got to tell you, that is the scariest thing I've ever heard.

I don't want to go backwards. I don't want to go back to the time where we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. President Obama to his credit and the Democratic Congress here are trying to fix the mess that they created, and we are now beginning to see job increases in this country. Not as much as we want, but we're moving in the right direction.

But in the meantime, we cannot turn our backs on those who are unemployed. So I say to my Republican friends in the United States Senate, stop your obstructionism. Stop playing politics with unemployment benefits and move out of the way and allow this bill to move forward so we can vote on it here on the House floor.

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