Amy Klobuchar: “I would like to speak on the vote that is about to occur in this Chamber on the Rebuild America Jobs Act. Over the past…”

“I would like to speak on the vote that is about to occur in this Chamber on the Rebuild America Jobs Act. Over the past few days, we have been discussing how to best address our Nation's crumbling infrastructure. The cracks in this broken system became tragically clear on a beautiful summers day in Minnesota, August 1, 2007, when the I-35W bridge simply crashed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people and throwing dozens of cars in the river. As I said that day, a bridge should not fall down in the middle of America, but it did, and an eight-lane highway should not fall down, not a highway that is literally six blocks from my house, a bridge that I drive over every day with my family, but that is what happened. Four years after the I-35W bridge collapsed and was fixed a year later, still 25 percent of the Nation's 600,000 bridges have been declared structurally deficient or obsolete--25 percent. Our country has gotten a near-failing grade from the Civil Academy of Engineers. Our construction workers have an unemployment rate that is over 13 percent--more than 4 points above the national average. These are not acceptable realities in this country. Americans spend 4.8 billion hours every year stuck in congestion, stuck in traffic. When you look at what happens in other countries, other countries that are spending 7, 8, 9 percent of their gross national product on infrastructure, we are barely hanging in at 2 percent.…”