Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act -- Motion to Proceed--Resumed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, actually, I am not here to play the blame game. I am here to talk about a place where we in the Senate have found real bipartisan consensus. It is an issue that is critical to us in the State of New Hampshire and to all the Senators because, in 23 days, our country's surface transportation programs are going to shut down unless Congress can come to an agreement on critical legislation.

Nearly 3 months ago, 74 Senators voted to pass a measure that would reauthorize these programs through the end of fiscal year 2013, providing much needed certainty to our States and to private industry. In this Chamber, Senators from vastly different ideologies were able to lay aside those differences and come up with bipartisan ways to pay for this bill, to streamline Federal programs, and to make our transportation investments more efficient, so we spend less on overhead, more on roads and bridges and other transportation projects.

This process was not easy, as everyone remembers. It required compromise from both sides to ensure that we could put together legislation that would bring America's transportation policies into the 21st century. But if Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma, the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Barbara Boxer, the chair of that committee, can come together and figure out how to put together a transportation bill, there is no reason why our adjoining body over in the House cannot do the same thing.

I have been very disturbed by recent news that the House

is less interested in finishing this bill than in approving a host of unrelated policies. There is a time and a place for us to consider whether some of the amendments that have been proposed on the Transportation bill in the House, such as whether coal ash should be regulated as a hazardous material, but the Transportation bill is not one of those places.

We need to focus on policies that will encourage the types of investment in our highways, in our railroads, in our bridges that put Americans back to work and spur economic growth. We just heard the unemployment rate went up slightly for the last month. We have legislation pending that came out of the Senate that would put people back to work.

Every billion dollars we spend in transportation funding puts 28,000 people to work, and we have the House fiddling while construction workers all over this country are out of work. The conference committee needs to focus on transportation policies that will reduce congestion, that will create jobs, and that unleash economic development.

We have a project similar to that in New Hampshire. It is one of our most important roads. It is the corridor that goes from our largest city of Manchester down to the border with Massachusetts. It has too much traffic on it today. It is a safety concern. We need to finish this road. We are being held up from doing that because of the failure of the House to be willing to go along with what the Senate did and reach agreement.

Our Department of Transportation in New Hampshire has said that work on just a single portion of this highway, Interstate 93, will put to work 369 people in the construction industry, which is still struggling. That is the industry in this country that still has the biggest impact from this recession. Last year in Nashua and Portsmouth, NH, construction employment declined by 7 percent. Job creation in that industry remains stagnant in New Hampshire and nationwide and we need this legislation to get these folks back to work.

It is not only construction jobs that depend on Federal investments in transportation; it is our economy as a whole. The deteriorating condition of America's infrastructure, its roads, its railroads, its bridges, costs businesses more than $100 billion a year in lost productivity, and this is a bill that a broad coalition of people are behind. Both the AFL CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agree that we need transportation legislation.

Despite the importance of this spending to American workers and businesses today, the House plans to vote on a motion to cut Federal transportation investment by one-third. The Federal Highway Administration found that cutting funding so severely would put 2,000 people in New Hampshire alone out of work, one-half million people in the country out of work.

This is a time when we should be creating jobs, not destroying them. Cutting funding at this time would be so shortsighted. Brazil, China, and India are all spending about 9 percent of their GDP per year on infrastructure, roads, bridges, public transportation. What we are spending in the United States is roughly 2 percent. That is half of what we were spending in the 1960s when there was real bipartisan support for policies from both President Kennedy and President Dwight Eisenhower to invest in projects such as our Interstate Highway System.

Both Republicans and Democrats agree that investment in our Interstate Highway System was one of the best decisions in our Nation's history. Members of both parties need to come together as we have for decades and focus on reasonable bipartisan policies that will end the uncertainty that States and private industry are facing when it comes to our transportation legislation.

On June 30, it will have been 1,000 days since our last Federal Transportation bill expired. Congress needs to come together now and pass a transportation reauthorization bill before we get to the end of those 1,000 days.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source