Bill Keating: “Thank you for yielding. I just came here to advance statements by our fellow freshmen and my neighbor from Rhode Island…”

“Thank you for yielding. I just came here to advance statements by our fellow freshmen and my neighbor from Rhode Island because here we are in a virtually empty Chamber, sitting here talking about jobs. Before I became a Member of Congress, just a few months ago, my job, and I was fortunate to have one, was the job of a district attorney. Now, the intricacies of that job are not well known, but one of the responsibilities we have in our State is, when there is an unattended death, a death that, for instance, did not occur in a hospital, it's important that that be investigated for any indications of foul play from a criminal standpoint. So, as a result, the troopers attached to my unit and my prosecutors reviewed the deaths of people. I must say, just to put this in context in a very personal sense to me, one of the most tragic and heart-wrenching parts of that job was coming upon the scenes of suicides. And in the course of that, over the last couple of years, we actually saw situations where people, depressed, hopeless, took their own lives. And they left indications that I won't get into as to the reason they did that. So many of those people were out of work, chronically out of work. Their homes were falling apart. Their families were falling apart, and hope had been extinguished. There were notes. There were indications. There was the way you go back and talk to a family and say what brought the person to this to make sure you knew just what happened.…”