[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 13154-13156]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, tonight we welcome President Obama to 
the Congress to deliver a jobs address. The President will be coming at 
a time when we have had persistent unemployment at a greater rate than 
at any time since the Great Depression. No one should blame our 
President for problems with an economy that he inherited, but the 
President should take responsibility for making the economy worse.
  Unemployment is up. The debt is up. Housing values are down. The 
morning paper reports we may be on our way--at least the chances are 
50-50, the newspaper says this morning--to a double-dip recession. The 
number of unemployed Americans is up about 2 million since the 
President took office. The amount of Federal debt is up about $4 
trillion.
  As I mentioned in discussing the proposals of the Senator from 
Nebraska, the President's policies, rather than helping over the last 
2\1/2\ years, have thrown a big wet blanket over private sector job 
creation. They have made it more expensive and more difficult for the 
private sector to create jobs for Americans.
  Let me be specific about that. The President chose, 2 years ago, 
rather than to focus exclusively on jobs, to focus on health care. His 
proposal was to expand a health care delivery system that already cost 
too much, that was already too expensive. So we have new health care 
taxes and mandates that make the economy worse.
  Why do I say that? I met, for example, with the chief executive 
officers of several of the nation's largest restaurant companies. They 
reminded me that restaurants and hospitality organizations in the 
United States are the largest employers, outside of government, and 
that their employees are mostly young and mostly low income. One of the 
chief executives said because of the mandates of the health care law it 
would take all of his profits from last year to pay the costs, when it 
is fully implemented, so he will not be investing in any new 
restaurants in the United States. Another said they operate with 90 
employees per store, but as a result of the mandates and taxes in the 
health care law, their goal will be to operate with 70 employees per 
store. One of the largest employers is saying instead of having 90 
employees per store, we are going to have 70. That doesn't help create 
new jobs in the United States.
  Let's take the debt. The President inherited the debt but he has made 
it worse. The economists who look at debt say we are heading toward a 
level that will cost us, in the United States, 1 million jobs every 
year.
  Undermining the right-to-work law--the President's appointees to the 
National Labor Relations Board have told the Nation's largest 
manufacturer of large airplanes that they cannot build a plant in South 
Carolina. It is the first new plant to build large airplanes in 40 
years in this country. The Boeing Company sells those airplanes 
everywhere in the world. It could build them anywhere in the world. We 
want them to build them in the United States. Those kinds of actions by 
the National Labor Relations Board make it worse.
  Regulations that put a big wet blanket over job creation, such as the 
one the Senator from Nebraska talks about, make it worse. The 
President's

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refusal to send trade agreements to Congress makes it worse. Let's be 
clear about this. Since the day the President took office, he has had 
on his desk three trade agreements, already signed by both countries. 
They simply need approval by Congress--one with Panama, one with South 
Korea, one with Colombia. We are ready to approve them in a bipartisan 
way if he will send them here. What will that mean in Tennessee? We 
make a lot of auto parts in Tennessee. We can sell them to South Korea. 
At the present time, Europeans sell them to South Korea at a lower 
price because of the tariff situation, because the President has not 
sent the three trade agreements to Congress. So all these steps have 
made the economy worse. Of course, with a bad economy home values have 
stayed down. That is making it worse, too.
  So what can we do about this? What are the kinds of things the 
President could talk about tonight and that we could work on together 
to make it easier and cheaper to create private sector jobs? We could 
change the tax structure in a permanent way, not short-term fixes but 
long-term lowering of tax rates for everyone, closing loopholes, 
creating a situation where our businesses are more competitive in the 
world marketplace. That is one thing we could do.
  We could stop the avalanche of regulations that is throwing the big 
wet blanket over job growth. The Senator from Nebraska suggested a 
few--a moratorium on new regulations; avoiding guidance, as he 
suggested, that circumvents the rules or regulations; stopping wacky 
ideas such as regulating farm dust, as if everybody did not know that 
all farms create dust.
  More exports--the President could send, today, the three trade 
agreements to Congress. We could ratify them and then crops grown in 
Tennessee and Nebraska and every other State in this country, and auto 
parts, and medical devices, could be sold around the world. Our State 
alone has $23 billion and tens of thousands of jobs tied up in exports. 
This could add to that.
  In addition to that, we could agree on advanced research. The 
President's recommendations have been good on that. But we should agree 
on that and move ahead with appropriations bills and a fiscal situation 
that permits us to do the kind of advanced research we need to do to 
create jobs.
  We need to fix No Child Left Behind. Better schools mean better jobs. 
We need a long-term highway bill. We need roads and bridges in order to 
have the kind of country we want. We need to find more American energy 
and use less. We should be able to agree on that.
  There is an agenda, not of more spending, not of more taxes, not of 
more regulation, but an agenda that would make it easier and cheaper to 
create private sector jobs and get the economy moving again.
  In another time a President named Eisenhower said ``I should go to 
Korea'' and he was elected President. He went to Korea before he was 
inaugurated and then he said ``I shall focus my time on this single 
objective until I see it all the way through to the end.'' The country 
felt good about that, they had confidence in him, he did that, and the 
Korean war was ended.
  President Obama chose, instead of focusing on jobs 2\1/2\ years ago 
in the same sort of Presidential way, to expand a health care delivery 
system that already was too expensive and in fact makes the problem 
worse. Tonight is an opportunity to make it better and we are ready to 
join with him in doing that, especially if he were to recommend lower 
tax rates, fewer loopholes on a permanent basis, fewer regulations, and 
if he were to send the three trade agreements to us to ratify.
  I wish to turn my attention to a different subject. September 11 is 
Sunday. I listened carefully, as most of us in the Senate do, to words 
that seem to resonate with my audiences. I have consistently found 
there is one sentence that I usually cannot finish without the audience 
interrupting me before breaking into applause, and it is this: ``It is 
time to put the teaching of American history and civics back into its 
rightful place in our schools so our children can grow up learning what 
it means to be an American.'' The terrorists who attacked us on 
September 11 were not just lashing out at buildings and people. They 
were attacking who we are as Americans. Most Americans know this, and 
that is why there has been a national hunger for leadership and 
discussion about our values. Parents know our children are not being 
taught our common culture and our shared values.
  National tests show that three-fourths of the Nation's 4th, 8th, and 
12th graders are not proficient in civics knowledge, and one-third 
don't even have basic knowledge, making them civic illiterates. That is 
why I made making American history and civics the subject of my maiden 
speech when I first came to the Senate in 2003, and by a vote of 90 to 
0 the Senate passed my bill to create summer residential academies for 
outstanding teachers of American history and civics. Every year I bring 
them on the Senate floor, and those teachers from all over our country 
have a moment to think about this Senate. They usually go find a desk 
of the Senator from Alaska, if they are an Alaskan teacher, or the 
Senator from Tennessee, or Daniel Webster's desk, or Jefferson Davis's 
desk, and they stop and think about our country in a special way.
  The purpose of those teachers is better teaching, and the purpose of 
the academy is more learning of key events, key persons, key ideas, and 
key documents that shape the institutions of the democratic heritage of 
the United States.
  If I were teaching about September 11, these are some of the issues I 
would ask my students to consider. No. 1, is September 11 the worst 
thing that ever happened to the United States? Of course the answer is 
no, but I am surprised by the number of people who say yes. It saddens 
me to realize that those who make such statements were never properly 
taught about American history. Many doubted that we would win the 
Revolutionary War. The British sacked Washington and burned the White 
House to the ground in the War of 1812. In the Civil War we lost more 
Americans than in any other conflict, with brother fighting against 
brother. The list goes on. Children should know why we made those 
sacrifices and fought for the values that make us exceptional.
  The second question I would talk about is, What makes America 
exceptional? I began the first session of a course I taught at 
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government 10 or 11 years ago by making a 
list of 100 ways America is exceptional, unique--not always better but 
unique. America's exceptionalism has been a source of fascination ever 
since Tocqueville's trip across America in 1830 when he met Davy 
Crockett and Jim Bowie on the Mississippi River. His book, ``Democracy 
in America,'' is the best description of America's unique ideals in 
action. Another outstanding text is ``American Exceptionalism'' by 
Seymour Martin Lipset.
  A third question I ask my students is, Why is it you cannot become 
Japanese or French, but you must become an American? If I were to 
immigrate to Japan, I could not become Japanese. I would always be an 
American living in Japan. But if a Japanese citizen came here, they 
could become an American, and we would welcome that person with open 
arms. Why? It is because our identity is not based on ethnicity but on 
a creed of ideas and values in which most of us believe.
  The story Richard Hofstadter wrote:

       It is our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to 
     be one.

  To become American citizens immigrants must take a test demonstrating 
their knowledge of American history and civics.
  Fourth, what are the principles that unite us as Americans? In 
Thanksgiving remarks after the September 11 attacks, President George 
W. Bush praised our Nation's response to terror. ``I call it the 
American character,'' he said.
  Former Vice President Gore, in his speech after the attacks, said:

       We should fight for the values that bind us together as a 
     country.


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  In my Harvard course that I mentioned, we put together a list of some 
of those values: liberty, e. pluribus unum, equal opportunity, 
individualism, rule of law, free exercise of religion, separation of 
church and state, laissez-faire, and the belief in progress, the idea 
that anyone can do anything. Anything is possible if we agree on those 
principles.
  I would say to my students, Why is there so much division in American 
politics? Just because we agree on the values doesn't mean we agree on 
how to apply those values. Most of our politics, in fact, is about the 
hard work of applying those principles to our everyday lives. When we 
do, we often conflict.
  For example, when discussing President Bush's proposals to let the 
Federal Government fund faith-based charities, we know, in God we 
trust--we have it here in the Senate--but we also know we don't trust 
government with God. When considering whether the Federal Government 
should pay for scholarships that middle- and low-income families might 
use at any accredited school--public, private, or religious--some 
object that the principle of equal opportunity can conflict with the 
principle of separation of church and state.
  What does it mean to be an American? After September 11, I proposed 
an idea I call Pledge Plus Three. Why not start each school day with 
the Pledge of Allegiance--as many schools still do--and then ask a 
teacher or a student to take 3 minutes to explain what it means to be 
an American. I would bet the best 3-minute statements of what it means 
to be an American would come from the newest Americans. At least that 
was the case with my university students. The newest Americans 
appreciated this country the most and could talk about it the best.
  Ask students to stand and raise their right hands and recite the oath 
of allegiance just as immigrants do when they become American citizens. 
This is an oath that goes all the way back to the days of George 
Washington and Valley Forge. It reads like it was written in a tavern 
by a bunch of patriots in Williamsburg late one night. I recited this 
with my right hand up during a speech I recently gave on my American 
history and civics bill. It is quite a weighty thing and startles the 
audience to say:

       I absolutely renounce and abjure all allegiance and 
     fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or 
     sovereignty [and agree to] bear arms on behalf of the United 
     States when required by the law.

  The oath to become an American taken by George Washington and his men 
and now taken today in courthouses all across America is a solemn, 
weighty matter. Our history is a struggle to live up to the ideas that 
have united us and that have defined us from the very beginning, the 
principles of what we call the American character. If that is what 
students are taught about September 11, they will not only become 
better informed, they will strengthen our country for generations to 
come.
  I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, how much time is left on the majority 
side in morning business?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is 19 minutes remaining.

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