[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Page 15315]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             THE JOBS BILL

  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, before my friend, the majority 
leader, leaves the floor, let me remind him and our Senate colleagues 
and the American people that Republicans were prepared to vote on the 
President's second version of the stimulus bill last night. In fact, I 
offered a unanimous consent that we have that vote--not the motion to 
proceed to it but the actual vote. I am not going to renew that request 
at the moment but just would say to my friend, we are happy to have 
that vote. We were happy to have it last night.
  With regard to the pieces of it, my friend is correct; some of the 
pieces of this second stimulus might well be appropriate. I have 
recommended to the joint select committee--that he and I appointed 50 
percent of--that they take a look at some of the pieces of it which 
could well be included in a product we are going to get before 
Thanksgiving before the Senate and the House.
  So, again, we would be happy to vote on the entire package. We were 
happy to do it last night and also happy to look at pieces of it. We do 
have, as the majority leader and I have discussed before, important 
work to do in the Senate. We have the trade agreements we are going to 
approve tonight. We have three appropriations bills we are going to go 
to after that--the basic work of government, which we have not done in 
the last few years, the American people would like to see us do. We 
also have a joint select committee set up that could look at parts of 
the proposal to which the majority leader is referring. So I have some 
optimism that we will be able to come together on pieces of it that we 
think make sense.
  I will say that as far as I know, there is not a single Republican 
who thinks it is a good idea to raise taxes on over 300,000 business 
owners, which is what would happen under the so-called millionaires' 
surtax. So there are parts of it we very much disagree with. We have 
divided government. Neither party controls the entire government. We 
will only be able to pass those things we do agree on. I think there 
are parts of the package my friend refers to that could well be agreed 
to at some point this year on a bipartisan basis.

                          ____________________