Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2012

Floor Speech

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you very much, Mr. Rahall.

I rise in support of this motion to instruct. Over the past year, the President and Democrats have proposed a series of measures to spend a little bit of money to put people back to work, to spend some money to educate our kids, to build some new schools, to expand broadband. Every single one of those efforts has been met by resistance from Republicans. I realize why that is. The argument is that we don't have any more money to spend. I get that argument. What I don't get is the argument against this motion.

What this motion says is that forget spending new money. Let's just make sure that the money that we are already obligated to spend is spent on American jobs. No new money. Let's just redirect the money that we're spending on bridges, on roads, on railways, and make sure that it gets spent on U.S. companies.

It's wrong to suggest that we're talking about dramatically ratcheting up Buy American standards such that we're going to ignite some trade war with WTO companies. That's not what we're talking about here today. Buy American laws have been on the books for generations. What we're talking about is just bringing Buy American standards back to what they used to be.

The fact is that we have blown hole after hole after hole in Buy American, in part because the Chamber of Commerce, which opposes this motion to instruct, thinks it's a good thing for big multinational companies who bid on a lot of this work to be able to take big chunks of it overseas where they can drive down the cost to them and keep a bigger differential of the contract.

Let me give you an example of these loopholes. One loophole is a provision that allows you to segment a contract into all sorts of small, little pieces. When you segment that contract into small pieces, each one of those pieces can result in the amount of the particular contract being so small that it doesn't qualify for Buy American.

Well, on one particular bridge contract in San Francisco, by segmenting out the contract and getting around Buy American, we lost 43,000 tons of steel to a Chinese steel company. American jobs lost.

When you allow for every country that signs a trade agreement to be exempt from Buy American, this happened. Guess what? Today we make our dog tags on a European-made machine simply because the country that makes it is exempt from Buy American, and they bid 4 percent less than the American company did. American jobs lost.

We win when we enforce Buy American because what happens is a company gets a contract. They subcontract with other American companies, and the ripple effect of that one initial contract multiplies jobs times three throughout the economy. Every time we send a contract overseas, yes, it may save that particular bid 3 or 4 or 5 percent. But when we lose that job here in America, when we have to start paying unemployment compensation, when we lose the taxes to the Federal Government, when that unemployed worker's kids need to go on Medicaid, guess what? That 3 or 4 or 5 percent disappears overnight. Let's pass this motion to instruct.

Source