American Energy Solutions for Lower Costs and More American Jobs Act

Floor Speech

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I thank my good friend from California. I can't say enough about how much this Congress will miss him and how indebted we are to his outstanding service.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say some closing words about this Congress. I have spent most of my time in the Congress in the minority, with my good friends on the other side in control.

I must say that this is a most unusual 113th Congress. This package of bills is a shameful way to close this Congress.

Usually, this is a time--as I have seen it under Republican Congresses--when you make room for must-pass bills, not for never-to-pass bills or sure to be vetoed bills.

Today certainly was not the time to make up for running through the 113th Congress with neither an agenda, nor legislation to show for it, perhaps to show that Congress was entitled to be paid for being here for 2 years.

Instead of some must-pass bills--and I will suggest a few--what we have heard from my good friends on the other side are some tax and other giveaway bills that add to the deficit or bills that should be stamped ``special interest.''

There was legislation before us that, with small changes in law, could have been passed. Had those bills passed, they never would have been considered bills of one side or the other.

For instance, the Paycheck Fairness Act simply updates, in quite small ways, the Equal Pay Act. That is the act that I administered when I chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It is already on the books. Nobody wants to repeal it.

All the Paycheck Fairness Act would have done was to make small changes to bring it into the 21st century, and those changes have no ideological impact.

Or take the Federal Student Loan Refinancing Act. That begged for passage, to give students faced with debt and no jobs--this cohort of students who had the bad luck to come out of school in a bad economy--some relief. That bill surely deserved bipartisan support.

For me, however, the biggest piece of missing legislation is the reauthorized transportation bill, and I say that because that would have been the functional equivalent of the JOBS Act of 2014; instead, we are going to leave here this evening, having given nothing to the American people to assure them that there will be jobs for the 7 weeks that we are gone. That is what they most wanted. That is what we have been given least.

We are on track to beat last year's record. We are on track to become the least productive Congress in the history of our country. Closing the Congress with a bunch of never-to-pass bills that nobody envisioned would be taken up will never make up for the shameful record of the 113th Congress.

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