[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 1]
[House]
[Page 293]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE BENEFITS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. JACKSON LEE. Mr. Speaker, 48 hours, a million-plus Americans 
received letters in their mailboxes. They weren't overdue tax letters. 
They were not letters suggesting that you are at fault. It was not a 
notice to say that you are no longer an American citizen. It was not a 
letter to say you are now relieved of any responsibility to pay any 
bills or to provide for your family.
  It was a letter denying, or extinguishing, taking away the 
unemployment insurance that most Americans have come to understand 
that, as working Americans, having worked in their life, that they 
would be the recipient of these benefits during a brief lapse or an 
extended lapse of not being able to find work. The chronically 
unemployed percentage is the highest that it has been in decades, and 
therefore, this is not the time to delay.
  I hold in my hand as well a resume of a competent worker, a college 
graduate who has the responsibility to support his family and who has 
been looking for work for 2 years, earnestly, energetically, and 
intensely, and cannot find work.
  The clock is ticking on the 30 hours in the United States Senate, but 
the real concern is my friends in this body. Recognizing that these 
letters deal with people's lives, and to make a representation that all 
is well, unemployment generally is 7 percent. However, it was lower 
than that when President Bush signed the unemployment insurance 
benefits in 2008. These guys, these distinguished Americans, misfits, 
why can't they find work? Twenty thousand-plus are veterans looking for 
work, men and women who served in the United States military, or, as we 
met in the White House on Tuesday, a mother of two distinguished men 
who are serving in Afghanistan.
  So the 1.3 million languish while we are trying to make a 
determination that may not be able to be made. Frankly, I would ask 
that we all be reasonable. I would simply make the point that it is an 
emergency.
  I want to pause for a moment and thank the Houston Apartment 
Association that has worked with me and has sent a letter to all of 
their members asking for those 12,000, some of whom are residents of 
apartments in Harris County, to be sensitive and tolerant of those 
individuals who can document that they were the beneficiaries or the 
recipients of unemployment insurance that was cut off on December 28. I 
want to applaud them for their sensitivity in dealing with those 
particular individuals. I ask mortgage companies and utility companies 
and city water bill companies to be tolerant as well, to be working 
with families who are basically without a lifeline.

                              {time}  1015

  But the issue before us is the fact that these letters have gone to 
people such as this woman, who has looked for work every day. She liked 
her job and was laid off for no fault of her own.
  Right now, we have the opportunity to pass a 3-month emergency 
relief--some of us have introduced bills for 1 year--and then 
contemplate, discuss, and work with what might be the appropriate way 
of funding the continuation.
  No person unemployed, chronically or not, is happy with an 
unemployment benefit check. What they are happy with, Mr. Speaker, is 
the ability to work and to provide for their family.
  So I would make the argument that as we discuss privacy issues on the 
Affordable Care Act, which are already taken care of by CMS, today and 
tomorrow on the floor we should be passing unemployment insurance. I 
ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me, recognizing 
that Americans want to work. Let's help them transition with a bridge 
of unemployment insurance.

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