Chris Van Hollen: “It's hard to know where to begin because--I hope everyone was listening very carefully. If we allow these spending cuts…”

“It's hard to know where to begin because--I hope everyone was listening very carefully. If we allow these spending cuts to take place, we will lose hundreds of thousands of jobs in Virginia alone. Thousands of jobs around the country. You know, I've heard a lot of complaints from our Republican colleagues about the recovery bill and the fact that we had to do some emergency spending to prevent the loss of millions of jobs. You know what? That worked. And here our Republican colleagues here today are saying that we've got to make sure the spending cuts don't take place because if we do, it will result in a lot of lost jobs. Well, you know what? It takes jobs to build an aircraft carrier, absolutely. It also creates jobs when you invest in trying to repair and modernize our roads and our bridges, our infrastructure. The President submitted a jobs bill more than a year ago to this House to do exactly that. Let's invest more in modernizing our infrastructure. We haven't had a single vote on the President's jobs bill. So I'm really glad to hear our Republican colleagues say that if we make these kinds of cuts, it's going to result in lost jobs because you know what? You are right about that. The debate today is not about whether we should prevent the sequester from taking place. As I said, we should. It's how we do that. I heard again from the Republican leader the President doesn't have a plan. He has a plan.…”