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I agree that yesterday's jobs bill should have received bipartisan support, because it has received overwhelming bipartisan support in the past. I will continue to encourage my colleagues to support good jobs bills. Jobs are the #1, #2 and #3 priority of Americans, and the priority of Democrats. I continue to hope that Republicans will stop putting politics ahead of creating jobs, and we will continue calling for them to do so. For example, just this morning, my colleagues -- Dick Durbin, Charles Schumer, Patty Murray, Debbie Stabenow, and Mark Begich -- joined me in urging job-creation measures to be included in the final debt reduction deal, led by Vice President Biden. The bottom line is that Republicans should join Democrats to focus on creating jobs, instead of spending all their time blocking jobs bills and continuing to push their plan to end Medicare.

Republicans have been blocking jobs bills on the floor and we can't wait can't afford to wait for them to stop putting politics ahead of creating jobs for middle-class Americans. That is why today I called for jobs-creating measures to be part of the deficit reduction deal being negotiated between the White House and Congress. We need to reach a deal before the first week in August to avoid triggering the dire economic consequences that will come from failing to raise the debt ceiling. Our hope is that including jobs-creating policies in this deal will help put Americans back to work even if we continue to encounter Republican obstruction on the floor.

Let me put it this way: yesterday, Republicans blocked a jobs bill that has been creating jobs in distressed communities in a cost-effective manner since 1965. They blocked it even though this bill has previously passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. Instead of focusing on jobs, Republicans were more interested in loading up the bill with irrelevant amendments dealing with everything from light bulbs to the lesser prairie chicken to a sand dune lizard -- everything except jobs. This level of obstruction is extremely disappointing.

The jobs bill to reauthorize EDA would have created jobs not only for businesses, but for universities across the country. I will continue to encourage my Senate colleagues to consider job creation measures like this. I would also point out that the health care reforms we passed last year help alleviate the economic pressures on young people just out of college by allowing them to stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until age 26, up from age 23.

Just this week in Las Vegas, we inaugurated a transportation center at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Hispanics make up a large portion of the Nevada labor force. And the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which we passed last Congress, provides additional tools to protect Latinos from job discrimination. Hispanic unemployment has been ticking down from an all time high of 13.9 percent because of the policies we’ve implemented. But we want to accelerate this trend and EDA would help us do so.

I believe we need to pursue strategies that address our immediate need for job creation while also getting our fiscal house in order, and I believe we can do both. Democrats voted for the biggest reduction in discretionary spending cuts in history, and we are currently participating in negotiations to make additional spending cuts. But we believe that when we cut spending, we need to do it in a smart way that targets waste – for instance, by ending taxpayer giveaways to oil companies that don’t need them because they are raking in record profits. Targeting waste like this protects jobs while also cutting our deficit. 
At the same time, we need to be making jobs our top priority. That is why we called today for job-creating measures to be included in the bipartisan deal to cut the deficit that is currently being negotiated. This is the right balance between smart fiscal policy, and solutions we need to create jobs in the short term. I will also say that the height of shortsightedness would be failing to raise the debt ceiling, as some of my Republican colleagues are threatening to do. Warren Buffet said this would be the "most asinine act" ever, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said failing to raise the limit could cause “severe disruptions in financial markets.” Americans would see their retirement funds and savings depleted when the markets react as most experts are predicting they will would. So we need to make sure we are keeping both the long-term and short-term effects of economic policy squarely in mind.

I am confident that our unemployment rate can and will drop. But my Republican colleagues will have to shift their focus. We have two deficits in this country – a budget deficit and a jobs deficit. The jobs deficit is as critical to Americans as our budget deficit. I’ve called on Republicans to join Democrats in urging job measures to be included in a bipartisan debt-ceiling deal, led by Vice President Biden. And I hope Republicans will join Democrats in making this a priority.

Just a few weeks ago, I joined Secretary Chu to announce a major solar project in Nevada, expected to create thousands of clean energy jobs. This project --the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project – will lead to jobs in construction and operations and jobs in manufacturing and transportation. Nevada continues to be a leader when it comes to the generation of renewable energy, and this project will also bring clean energy to the region. Democrats are also continuing to pursue policies that would help create a clean energy economy here in the U.S. Today, we cited policies to create clean energy jobs as one area that should be considered for inclusion in the bipartisan deficit talks. This year, we have also tried to move two bills that had clean energy components – the SBIR bill would have reauthorized tens of millions of dollars of research into clean energy, and the EDA bill had specific job-creating clean energy grant programs included this time around. But Republicans blocked both of them.

Money in the Recovery Act was meant to get into the economy quickly to get the biggest bang for the buck. As the CBO just told us, the Recovery Act in the first quarter of 2011 increased "the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 3.3 million, and increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.6 million to 4.6 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise."

The Congressional Budget Office has told us that the best thing you can do to help the economy in the short run is to provide assistance to the unemployed, so we should look at that legislation to see how it might fit within a jobs-focused package.