Rob Andrews: “The urgent priority of this country, and it should be of this Congress, is to get Americans back to work. There is not a…”

“The urgent priority of this country, and it should be of this Congress, is to get Americans back to work. There is not a corner of this country that's not been severely afflicted by the unemployment crisis in this country. Mr. Garamendi proposes that we take a simple idea and put it into this bill, and I think he's absolutely right. Here's the idea. If we spend a significant amount of money, I think it's $300 million, for the purpose of retrofitting and maybe building some schools around the country, let's give a preference to schools that use American-made products and American-made goods over those that do not. I think that's a very commonsense idea. So if a school is going to put in solar panels to become more energy efficient and they can either buy the solar panels from a company here in the United States or one in Asia, let's favor the school that buys the solar panels from the United States to create jobs here. This is a simple and good idea. It should be on the floor so that we could debate it. Now, the dialogue I just heard was it's the Senate fault or it's this one's fault. With all due respect to all of our colleagues, Mr. Speaker, the days of whose fault it is are over. Long since over. And the time has long since passed for us to get to work passing commonsense legislation that puts the American people back to work. Mr. Garamendi has proposed just such a commonsense piece of legislation.…”