The Jobs Bill

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, over the past week, President Obama has been traveling around the country, trying to set a record for the number of times he can say the words ``pass this bill right away''--the number of times he can say it, actually in a 5-minute speech. Today he will bring his act to a 50-year-old bridge that connects my own State of Kentucky with Ohio. The purpose of this visit is perfectly clear. The President's plan is to go out to this bridge and say that if only lawmakers in Washington would pass his second stimulus bill right away, then bridges such as this one would get fixed and that the only thing standing in the way of repairing them is people like me.

I would like to make a couple points about all this. First, I find it hard to take the President's message all that seriously when his own communications director is over at the White House telling people he is no longer interested in legislative compromise when the leaders of the President's own party in Congress are treating this bill like an afterthought.

We would be more inclined to look at this so-called jobs bill if the President's own staff and members of his own party in Congress started taking it a little more seriously themselves.

Second, I remind the President that the people of Kentucky and Ohio have heard this kind of thing before. Don't forget, the President made the same promises when he was selling his first stimulus. It is a message he brought to Ohio repeatedly. Here is what he said 2 years ago this week at a stop in Warren, OH.

All across Ohio and all across the country, rebuilding our roads and our bridges ..... that's what the Recovery Act has been all about.

The Recovery Act is the stimulus bill, the first one. Yet 2 1/2 years later, what do we have to show for it? Politically connected companies such as Solyndra ended up with hundreds of millions of dollars, provided by the taxpayers, and bridges such as the one the President is attending today still need to be fixed.

It is worth noting, in fact, this one company blew through more taxpayer money than the first stimulus allocated for every road and bridge in the entire State of Kentucky combined.

The President told Ohioans and Kentuckians, the first stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent as well. Yet 2 1/2 years later unemployment in both States is still above 9 percent.

We have heard these promises before, and I don't think the President should expect anybody to fall for them again. I mean, how many stimulus bills do we have to pass before these bridges get fixed? How many? How many Solyndras do we have to finance? How much money do we have to waste before the President makes good on the promises he has already made? If a bridge needs fixing, by all means let's fix it. But don't tell us we need to pass a $ 1/2 trillion stimulus bill and accept job-killing tax hikes to do it. Don't tell the people of Kentucky they need to finance every turtle tunnel and solar panel company on some bureaucrat's wish list in order to get their bridges fixed. Don't patronize us by implying that if we pass the second stimulus, bridges will get fixed right away. The American people heard the same thing when the administration was selling the first stimulus, only to turn on their television sets 2 1/2 years later to see the President having a big laugh over the fact that all these shovel-ready projects weren't quite as shovel-ready as they thought they were.

So I suggest, Mr. President, that you think about ways to actually help the people of Kentucky and Ohio, instead of how you can use their roads and bridges as a backdrop for making a political point. If you are truly interested in helping our State, if you truly want to help our State, then come back to Washington and work with Republicans on legislation that will actually do something to revive our economy and create jobs and forget the political theater.

I yield the floor.

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