Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I am not going to object, but I wish to reiterate the comments of my colleagues from California, Maryland, and Rhode Island. I know my colleague from Louisiana will do the same. We have a broad bipartisan bill. Transportation and highways are a linchpin of our economic recovery, not only in the jobs they create now, rebuilding and building highways, but in making our economy more efficient.

China is building four times the infrastructure we are. India is building more infrastructure than we are, and in the Senate--to the credit of both sides--we have a broad bipartisan bill that moves us forward. It is not everything I would want or any of us would want. It was put together masterfully by Senator Boxer and Senator Inhofe, who are political opposites.

The House, in its paralysis--because there is a small group who, frankly, don't believe the government should be an infrastructure at all--ties it in a knot and forces us with the awful choice of either shutting things down because they are not going to budge or just renewing an old bill which needs updating, which throws people out of work. They are creating paralysis in this country in the case of infrastructure and in many other cases.

If the public wants to know why the country is not growing at a greater rate, wants to know why there is such high unemployment in the construction industries, look at the ideologues over there and their refusal to face reality, to deal with their colleagues, and to put this country--not us--in a take-it-or-leave-it position. This 90-day extension is not the way to go.

The way to go is to pass the Senate bill, and I hope those on the other side of the aisle, pushed by outside folks from business management and others all across the country, will see the error of their ways and change their ways over the next few months.

I thank my colleague, and I yield the floor.

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