Remarks by The Speaker:

Americans, there is no doubt that we are in dire economic straits. It is sometimes hard to believe that everyone up here at the Capitol, although yes, we still have OUR jobs, for the moment, we all, everyone who sits in these Chambers, all our hearts go out to the nation. That is Republican and Democrat alike. I assume that both of the TEA Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements and of every citizen in between and outside of these groups that represent a very great fraction of the public. Of course this extends to the President as well. I say this to both Right and Left and Center and whatever politics you can imagine, there is no one up here trying to destroy or harm this country. Not me. Not Barney Frank. Not Senator Reid nor McConnell is trying to harm the economy either from spurious actions or malign neglect and most assuredly, no, neither is the President. What we have are different interpretations, different views of what is possible, what is wise and what is legal. Yes, these are wildly divergent views; these are certainly antagonistic views but what we try to avoid, with mixed success, is being antagonistic with each other and above all, antagonistic to the Constitution.

Now, as the Constitution demands and as the Constitutionalists foresaw, the Legislature and Executive are locked in a stalemate. After two years of having wide majorities in both Houses, the President and his party now have to contend with opposition here in the House and a much thinner majority in the Senate. Believe me, no one up here on Capitol Hill needs to be reminded that this is the result of last year’s elections; The Shellacking, the President described it so eloquently as he is well known to do. But those of us who claim to revere and know the Constitution, and that is all of us, must recall and recognize that the President also won his historic election as did the Democrats who sit in whatever office. Weeks ago, the President sent us a bill, the Jobs Bill as we know it, or the American Jobs Act, the AJA. It is about a half a trillion dollar appropriation. The details are on the White House and House websites for all to see. There is nothing extraordinary in this. What IS extraordinary and a bone of contention for many, many House members, is the President’s public demand that his legislation be passed immediately and without amendment.

This has reminded some members of the previous Speaker’s statement regarding the medical insurance reforms that we would have to “pass it to find out what is in it.” I do not share that view, frankly. This jobs legislation is about a hundred and fifty pages and there are clearly some elements in line with broadly interpreted “conservatism” and we thank the President for that accomodation. We certainly do know what’s in it but here our views diverge with those of the President yet conform to those of our voters at home. It is our view that this bill would be disastrous for the current economy, something we can ill afford. I and a majority in this House today contend that, if passed exactly as the President has drafted it, this legislation will collapse employment, growth and federal revnues while absorbing something like half of the debt limit increase negotiated just a few weeks ago that was supposed to carry us through November of 2012, or at least to the first Tuesday. That is my view, that is the collective view of Republicans with no exceptions that have come to my attention.

The circumstances are however, quite complicated. Yes, we in the House hold a majority. We can and have passed spending and fiscal legislation like the Ryan Bill and others on similar issues. They are uniformly stopped in the Senate. That is fine, Senator Reid and his majority have the right and the duty to stop actions that are, in their view, damaging or wrong or, above all, unConstitutional. Likewise Senator Reid’s invocation of the so-called “nuclear option”, changing the rules on cloture to carve out some power from the minority to the majority, this is looked on with horror, and I am against it, but Senator Reid is acting within the Constitution although well outside of modern precedent. As the President said of himself not long ago, he won. Harry Reid won his re-election, and congratulations to him. His party retained their majority, though barely, and they are free to exercise their powers as they see most fit. In the same regard, the President’s repeated demands that there be immediate passage of his bill, unamended and unexamined through the routine committee process is not unConstitutional in the least. Like any Executive in history or any American citizen, he can demand and cajole and lobby and protest and drum and speak and stamp his feet if he wants to. It is we here in the House who have the Constitutional duty to act, not ignoring any input from any legitimate source. As practical politicians we also have the duty to admit the difference between what is possible and what is not.

Our view in the House majority and just in the conservative half of the nation is that these proposed policies are poisonous, above all to job growth, and the most recent proof of that is in the utter, open, inarguable failure of the various stimulus bills and related spending for which we appropriated some 1.6t dollars. No, the President and his party do not see it that way. The opinion of the nation is basically split. On the Right the opinion is that the President’s jobs bill amounts to an audacious bluff intended to give him a soundbite for next year’s campaign. Again, I diverge from that opinion. The President makes bold positive claims for this bill. The country at large is at best neutral. But there is no doubt that the Democratic Senate and Democratic President can and will prevent anything we would consider helpful; not because they don’t want to be helpful, let me re-stress that, but because they believe the policies, basically known as Reaganite or Supply-side economics, will be damaging; increasing the national debt when we want to cut it and harming growth. I don’t pretend to understand how they justify these claims, the history on this is not inscrutable. Not to me. But they have made their case either to their States at large or to the national electorate who have spoken in no uncertain terms.

And all the while, the nation declines. No one disputes this. Do something! the nation cries out, quite rightly, yet our politics is paralyzed. I propose the following shock treatment: I will guarantee, and the Whip will be giving out numbers as soon as we are done here, on my office as Speaker I will guarantee a number of Republican votes for the President’s bill, unamended, unfettered by committee schedules and such things. That number will depend on the House Democrats. It might be news to the general public that it is not just Republicans slowing the bill’s progress in the House. Democrats likewise wish to propose amendments but that is not part of the current narrative. That may change because what I pledge as Speaker is a number of Republican votes sufficient for a bare majority if the Democrats can deliver ninety percent of their own votes.

This proposal is itself unprecedented as far as we can tell, but it is well within the bounds of the Constitution. As you will hear and understand, this decision is not especially popular within my own party and especially the TEA Party faction in the House. But the House Republicans are MY problem. The House Democrats are the Minority Leader’s problem and also, of course, the Presidents. I urge my friends and colleagues in the Senate, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, to come to a similar concordance and we shall, as the President requests at every high school and coffee house in the nation, get this bill back to him to sign. Then the electorate gets one full year to examine these policies in action and decide whether they want more of the same or to reverse course. I and my party, naturally, would like to reverse course now. We would have liked a different course in ’08 and a great many who are newly elected, not myself, would have prefered we changed course from the fiscal policies of the Bush years. But we can’t go back. We can only go forward. The President has offered to lead. We now offer to follow to an extent that not even a President’s own party is often expected to do but we do so once, on this issue, and we attach one simple condition to our offer: it expires on October 31st.

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