20th Anniversary Of Enactment Of The Americans With Disabilities Act Of 1990

Floor Speech

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SMALL BUSINESS LENDING FUND ACT

Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, Republicans today will continue to look for a way forward on the small business bill. This is an opportunity to deliver some real relief to small businesses struggling to dig themselves out of the recession.

Ultimately, Democrats seem to have other priorities. In the middle of a debt crisis, Democrats cannot seem to pass trillion-dollar spending bills fast enough. In the middle of a jobs crisis, they continue to push one bill after another containing job-stifling taxes, new rules and regulations, and government intrusion into business.

Their signature piece of jobs legislation appears to be a bill that borrows $34 billion from our grandchildren to help folks who cannot find a job in the environment Democrats have created over the last year and a half.

This small business bill gives us an opportunity to have a real jobs debate. But Democrats clearly do not want to have that debate. That is why they have repeatedly pulled this bill from the floor to move on to what they consider more important things or to get together downtown to pat themselves on the back after signing another job-killing bill.

Let's have a real debate about jobs. Let's consider amendments that would help small businesses--amendments like the one Senator Johanns wants to offer to eliminate a burdensome paperwork mandate and that small businesses are pleading with us to approve.

Our leader on the Small Business Committee, Senator Snowe, is fighting to keep a provision out of this bill that amounts to another bailout. Members of both sides oppose it.

There is no evidence this new lending program will work. Even the Congressional Oversight Panel has expressed skepticism it will even be effective in increasing small business lending.

The panel's report is skeptical it will improve access to credit. Moreover, the panel says this provision looks uncomfortably similar to the TARP bailout.

The problem banks and small businesses are facing is not that they don't have incentive to lend; it is that the government is threatening them with a 2,300-page bill full of new rules and regulations while their customers--small businesses--are threatened by pending tax hikes and more government intrusion.

For more than a year and a half, the President and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill have pushed an antibusiness, antijobs agenda on the American people in the form of one massive government intrusion after another. Then there is a celebration. Here is an opportunity to have a real debate about job creation. Here is an opportunity to do something that might actually make a positive difference.

Small business owners are already being hammered by the health care bill. They are about to get hammered by the financial regulatory bill. It is time to do something they actually want for a change.

The American people are connecting the dots. They don't think the financial regulatory bill will solve the problems in the financial sector any more than they think the health care bill will be able to lower costs or lead to better care; any more than the stimulus lowered unemployment.

Republicans had offered amendments that would create the conditions for real private sector job growth. If Democrats shared this priority, this bill would have been law by now. Instead, they seem committed to the same approach that has led to 3 million lost jobs in the past year and a half.

I yield the floor.

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