Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization of 2011 - Motion to Proceed - Continued
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I would like to first express my appreciation to the Senator from Ohio for his work on these education issues, particularly the importance of the Stafford loan and avoiding the interest rate jump that is scheduled to take place. And I would point out that had we passed the so-called Buffett rule bill so that Americans who earn well over $1 million a year would actually all pay a fair share of taxes, that would have created somewhere between $47 billion and $163 billion in revenues, and that would readily pay for keeping the student loan rate down. So I hope we can find another way to do it, but that would have been one good way.
The reason I am on the floor this evening is because I was at Wickford Junction in Rhode Island earlier today, where a new commuter rail station has been built, largely through the energy and effort of my senior Senator, Jack Reed, over many years. Secretary LaHood, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, came to be present at that event, and that reminded me, of course, of the highway bill, which is probably the biggest jobs bill we could pass here in Congress.
We tend to talk a good game on jobs. Recently, we even referred to a bill as a JOBS bill. It had kind of a trick: It was actually called Jumpstart Our Business Startups, J-O-B-S. They made an acronym so that it sounded like a jobs bill when what it really did was to allow people to market stocks without the usual safeguards that protect investors and consumers.
So we do a lot to try to convince people we are working on jobs here in Congress, but the one bill that indisputably is really going to be helpful to the American economy to provide jobs would be the highway bill that the Senate passed--2.9 billion jobs protected or created. In my State of Rhode Island, it is 9,000 jobs, and I promise you we could use those 9,000 jobs in Rhode Island right now. The bill passed the Senate with flying colors, with every kind of credit you could associate with a piece of legislation. It passed 74 to 22. A 75th Senator indicated that he would have supported it but he was called out of town for a funeral. And obviously, with a 74-to-22 lopsided vote, his vote was not necessary. But, in effect, 75 Senators are on record supporting that bill, which in this Senate, as everybody knows, is a considerable landslide of a majority.
Now, 2.9 million jobs is a serious thing in this economy, with 9,000 in Rhode Island that we desperately need. And the bill left not only with the support of a unanimous Environment and Public Works committee, where it came from originally--and I commend both Senator Boxer and Senator Inhofe, the chair and the ranking member, for pulling that together. As people who watch the Senate know, Senator Boxer and Senator Inhofe come from rather different political persuasions, and yet they were able to agree on this and bring a bill out of committee unanimously.
It then came to the floor and went forward. We had 5 weeks of floor debate. We added 40 amendments either by vote or agreement. It was very bipartisan, it was very transparent, and we ended up with that 75-to-22 expression of support by the Senate for that bill.
There was a rather different story on the House side. They knew the March 31 deadline was approaching--it had been a matter of law for a long time--and they blew the deadline. They had no bill going into it. They tried several times to come up with something, and they couldn't do a thing. They had no bill at all.
So without a bill, one would hope they could have passed the Senate bill. They certainly had the votes. All they had to do was call it up and pass it. Democrats and Republicans would have voted for it, and we would be getting those jobs out there right now. Instead, they had no bill, and they chose to pass an extension. The extension is actually pretty harmful. They actually passed two, and they are both harmful.
The first short-term extension--I spoke to my DOT director in Rhode Island. He was at Wickford Junction as well, and we have done a couple of other events in the past week or so to try to bring attention to this. He has a list of roughly 95 or 96 projects they want to get done in Rhode Island in the summer building season, the highway construction season. He estimates that probably 40 of those jobs are going to fall off the list because they don't know what their long-term funding is, and they can't commit to those jobs until this gets settled. So these short-term extensions are very harmful. They cost jobs. They are job killers. Yet the House has passed two of them.
To make it even more complicated, they threw on the last one--a requirement that the Keystone Pipeline be bulldozed through all the regulatory and environmental reviews that are necessary. Say what you want about the Keystone Pipeline, it is a completely contentious, controversial issue here in Congress. They did not make an effort to resolve it on the House side. This was not something where they brought people together, came to a resolution on the Keystone Pipeline, and then added it to the bill. No. They just took their Republican version of it without any effort to be bipartisan and stuffed it into the highway extension.
So they have missed the chance to pass really good bipartisan legislation out of the Senate, they have passed a job-killing extension that is very harmful to folks doing highway work around the country, and they have complicated it further by throwing a controversial issue on top.
If you are serious about jobs--and I know we talk a lot about it in the Senate--if you are serious about jobs, we should stop that nonsense and take up the Senate bill and pass it in the House and get everybody to work. In the absence of that, we need to make sure that we move to conference very quickly, that we appoint conferees, and that we get going.
This is important to Rhode Island. As I said, we desperately need these highway jobs. So I am going to continue, along with many of my colleagues, coming to the Senate floor to put the pressure on to do something that is very simple: pass a highway bill. This is not complicated. We have been doing it since Eisenhower was President, and the fact that we can't do it now says a lot about the capacity for governance of the House of Representatives under this Speaker.
Madam President, I yield the floor.
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