Rob Andrews: “America has had an economic disaster and a natural disaster. The economic disaster is 15 million people unemployed, and…”

“America has had an economic disaster and a natural disaster. The economic disaster is 15 million people unemployed, and then we had the natural disasters of August. This bill tries to help the natural disaster get solved by making the economic disaster worse. It takes a program that has produced 39,000 private sector jobs and cripples it. Now, the ostensible purpose for this is that we want to offset the spending to help deal with the natural disasters we had around this country in August; but on multiple occasions in the last 7 years, different administrations came to the Congress and asked for infrastructure spending to help rebuild Iraq--$3.7 billion worth of it to help rebuild Iraq and not a penny of offset. Ladies and gentlemen, if we can vote to spend the public's money to rebuild roads and bridges in Iraq, let's not require an offset to rebuild roads and bridges in New York and Vermont and New Jersey. The right vote is ``no.'' Rewrite this bill, and do so in a way without worsening our economic disaster.”