Hartzler urges Senate to pass job bills

In her weekly column, Fourth District Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler urges the Senate to pass jobs legislation sent to it by the House.

We are into November and the major mission of the House of Representatives has been to provide businesses with the environment needed to create jobs – and that effort is badly needed.

The latest unemployment report, released Friday, puts America’s official jobless figure at 9 percent. It’s time for the Democrat-controlled Senate to put an end to partisanship and pass a set of job creation bills approved by the House. We have been talking about the ‘Forgotten 15’ – the 15 pieces of legislation passed by the House and awaiting Senate action. But since we started talking about the ‘Forgotten 15’ the number of job creation bills passed by the House and being stalled by the Senate has risen to 20. This is ridiculous! The unemployment figure is proof positive that the Obama Administration’s policies are not working. Our unemployment rate has now been above 8 percent for 33 months. Add to this the fact that there are 1.5 million fewer jobs in this country than when President Obama signed what he called his “jobs bill” into law. We can and must do better.

This week, the House unveiled a new piece of legislation, the Jobs Through Growth Act, which is designed to keep America open for business by cutting through the red tape that stands in the way of business growth. It also passed two important bills designed to remove some of the roadblocks to that job-creating environment: H.R. 2930, the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act and H.R. 2940, the Access to Capital for Job Creators Act.

This week, I introduced legislation to eliminate some of the negative provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act in an effort to make it easier for locally-owned banks to lend money to small and medium-sized local businesses so they can grow and create jobs. Dodd-Frank was supposed to more closely monitor the big banks and create consumer confidence. Instead, this overreaching government regulation has harmed smaller, regional banks by making it difficult for them to lend to small and mid-sized businesses through fixed rate loans. Small businesses and American manufacturers need access to credit. My bill, the Small Business Credit Availability Act (H.R. 3336), would exempt small banks, credit unions, and farm credit banks from regulations that were intended to rein in the activities of large, national banks. My legislation alters Dodd-Frank to keep power at the local level. It will keep those small, locally-owned banks in business by giving them the freedom they need to more easily make loans to businesses serving their communities.

In other news, I participated in several House Armed Services Committee hearings with the military service chiefs and other Defense officials on the state of our military and the potential impact on our national defense if more defense cuts occur. In short, the impact would be devastating. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warns that if looming cuts to national defense are enacted our national unemployment will rise by 1 percent. That’s more than 1.53 million jobs lost – many of them service members and defense civilians. We must avoid further cuts!

I also met with fellow House Agriculture Committee members to discuss ongoing development with the supercommittee and the Farm Bill. Many changes are being considered for the Farm Bill, but nothing has yet been finalized. I spoke with Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas and strongly voiced the priorities of the Fourth District, and he assured me he will take our District’s needs into account during the negotiations.