Jobs and the Make It In America Agenda

Floor Speech

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Mr. KEATING. Thank you for yielding.

I just came here to advance statements by our fellow freshmen and my neighbor from Rhode Island because here we are in a virtually empty Chamber, sitting here talking about jobs.

Before I became a Member of Congress, just a few months ago, my job, and I was fortunate to have one, was the job of a district attorney. Now, the intricacies of that job are not well known, but one of the responsibilities we have in our State is, when there is an unattended death, a death that, for instance, did not occur in a hospital, it's important that that be investigated for any indications of foul play from a criminal standpoint. So, as a result, the troopers attached to my unit and my prosecutors reviewed the deaths of people.

I must say, just to put this in context in a very personal sense to me, one of the most tragic and heart-wrenching parts of that job was coming upon the scenes of suicides. And in the course of that, over the last couple of years, we actually saw situations where people, depressed, hopeless, took their own lives. And they left indications that I won't get into as to the reason they did that.

So many of those people were out of work, chronically out of work. Their homes were falling apart. Their families were falling apart, and hope had been extinguished. There were notes. There were indications. There was the way you go back and talk to a family and say what brought the person to this to make sure you knew just what happened.

That is the most powerful way, I think, that you can understand why we are here in this Congress trying to put people back to work. We have to do everything we can do in our power to do this. To be out of work is human misery, and it's a misery that extends to spouses, sons and daughters; conversations where one of these instances where the person that took their life was told that they would never be able to afford to go to the college they were accepted to.

So when we have this discussion here in this Congress, I hope we don't continue to have this discussion about jobs in empty Chambers. I hope it becomes the focal point of our open sessions because, frankly, there hasn't been enough of that discussion.

I came here imbued with a sense of challenge and responsibility, that I would do everything that I could to try and stop this human misery from occurring in families and individuals. So I hope as we go forward and we look at Make It in America, we look at other platforms and policies to try and put people back to work, we don't forget these aren't people just called our constituents. These are real people, people suffering more than they ever should.

In my own district, as people are ready to go through the tourist system and the wealthier people come to celebrate their vacations, they're doing it in a region where the unemployment is 16 percent, and too many people are out of work.

I hope, as we go forward, that as freshmen, we come forward and remember what we said in the campaign just a few months ago, focus on what we said we would do. And I hope that kind of freshman enthusiasm is contagious, and I hope we're having robust discussions about putting people back to work, not here in an empty Chamber but in a full Chamber with ideas teeming so that we can accomplish that very important mission.

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