Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I rise today to speak on behalf of the 2.3 million Americans, including the 140,000 New Jerseyans who have been without a job for months and desperately need our help. These Americans are Americans who are veterans who stood for us in the military and Armed Forces. These are families and individuals with children. These are our seniors. These are folks who have been working for decades and suddenly found themselves in the worst economy of my lifetime without a job.

I am very proud of this body. We are inching closer toward passing legislation to restore Federal unemployment insurance. What this money does is it takes families from crisis with these meager checks to give a little bit of stability so they can do what is necessary to look for work.

It helps them keep their car insurance so they can ride to interviews. It helps them keep the cable service going so they can apply online and actually file their résumés as they look for jobs. It helps them meet mortgage payments, so they can keep a roof over their heads or rental payments as well.

I want to thank the incredible bipartisan leadership of Dean Heller and Jack Reed. Senator Heller and Senator Reed have been working hard together with a group of us relentlessly to bring us this far. I have been so grateful for the leadership of those two Senators and others because it made us so close in this body to getting unemployment insurance extended.

This is a bipartisan bill. It involves compromise. It is what the American people want us to do, Republicans and Democrats coming together for millions of Americans that are in crisis right now through no fault of their own, in an economy where there are three people looking for a job for every single job that is available.

I want to express my gratitude to the entire bipartisan group cosponsoring the bill. My colleagues, Senator Reed, Senator Heller, Senator Merkley, Senator Sherrod Brown, Senator Durbin, Senator Susan Collins, Senator Rob Portman, Senator Lisa Murkowski, and Senator Mark Kirk, Republicans and Democrats alike who hammered out a compromise, have done the difficult work and are pushing to move this forward.

I also want to thank people from New Jersey who have shared their stories with me, who have been active and engaging from online posts, letters, and phone calls--all of them fighting to find work. I have heard from Republican New Jerseyans and Democratic New Jerseyans. I have heard from military veterans and single moms. I have heard from folks who are so hungry to work. But while they are looking, they are looking to this body, to all of Congress to help them meet the basic minimum needs so that they can continue to have some stability and not be swallowed up by the quicksand of economic crisis and to be able to continue to find a job.

They are living examples. Each and every one of those millions of Americans are examples of what is at stake if we do not act. I have heard painful stories of people facing real crises, from homelessness to skipping medications, doing everything they can to keep some semblance of stability so that they can find a job. Unfortunately, many are falling through the cracks. Many are facing the darkest of days.

As the Senate prepares to vote on this incredibly vitally important bill, I want to stress that this legislative body is only as effective as both Chambers and parties being able to come together, to really follow in that great American tradition that for the last 50 years, Democrats and Republicans during times of economic crisis, have come together and found a way to hammer out compromises to extend unemployment insurance under Reagan, under Bush, under Clinton, and under Carter. We found a way to get forward, both Chambers being there for Americans in the economic crisis.

Today is a significant step in our fight to restore hope to America's unemployed but only if this bill is also voted on and passed in the House of Representatives.

I have sat in living rooms, diners, and soup kitchens all across the State of New Jersey, and I can tell you the crisis is real. I am hopeful that if my colleagues in the House of Representatives listen to the voices--Republicans and Democrats, red and blue, North and South, all across this country--of their unemployed constituents, they will do what is right. They will shun that intellectually unreal idea that Americans are lazy, that they don't want to work. We have millions of Americans out there fighting for their hope of finding a job, and they need the help of the House of Representatives, as I believe they will get it from the Senate this week.

No matter our party, all of us have folks in our home States who are unemployed and suffering because we have thus far failed to do what every other Congress has done in the past when long-term unemployment rates have been so high, as they are today. We must extend Federal unemployment insurance. America needs our House of Representatives to listen to the pleas of those who are barely making ends meet.

I remember Joan and her daughter, a recent Rutgers University graduate. They live together and were both cut off from unemployment insurance the same week in December. The modest unemployment checks that Joan and her daughter were receiving had helped them to keep up with mortgage payments. While they waited for us to vote, their home was placed into foreclosure.

Then there is Lauren from Clifton, who wrote my office saying she had sent out close to 1,000 resumes without luck and had reached the point where she couldn't pay to keep the heat on in her house during this brutal winter and she feared her phone was going to have to be cut off next. She wrote:

I've been looking for work tirelessly. What does someone in my situation do?

These folks have worked hard all of their lives. They have played by the rules but unfortunately happen to be in a bad economy not of their making, which they did not contribute to, and are caught in these difficult times. They are doing everything right and so should their representatives in Congress.

Today we are casting a vote for them. Today I am proud to say that in the Senate we are coming together, Democrats and Republicans, hammering out a compromise, meeting each other in the middle, and doing what is expected of us by Americans--reaching out, lending a hand, in a time of crisis. I implore my colleagues in the House of Representatives to do the same.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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