On the recordJune 7, 2011
as the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee who watched with pleasure as we voted this bill out of our committee with total unanimous support--except for one, we almost had everyone--I am delighted that the leader has chosen to go to the reauthorization of the Economic Development Administration. I will tell you why. There are three reasons: jobs, jobs, jobs. We know when President Obama took over, he faced a situation where we were losing 700,000 to 800,000 jobs a month. Imagine. We were bleeding those jobs. Credit was frozen. We almost lost the auto industry. We had to take tremendous steps to turn this around. I personally believe, after listening to the experts evaluate what we did, that we did some very important work to stabilize this economy. But clearly this recession we are trying to get out of is the worst since the Great Depression. The job loss has been severe. So it is very difficult. When you lose 7, 8 million jobs in that kind of a downturn, you need robust job creation to get these jobs back. We had a very important bill on the floor dealing with small business--to help small business. That bill was loaded with a bunch of extraneous amendments and it never got off the floor. Now is our chance. I do not mind it if people attach amendments that they think are very important, and we have some reasonable time set aside for those, we have votes on those. I do not have any problem with that.…
