Obama urges Congress to ‘pass this jobs bill’ in radio address

Against a backdrop of bleak prospects in Congress, President Obama’s jobs bill was the focus of his weekly radio address Saturday, and he used real-life examples of struggling Americans and urged, as he has for three weeks, “Pass this jobs bill.”

Obama unveiled the American Jobs Act before a joint session of Congress on Sept. 8, but it has garnered little public support on Capitol Hill. Even some leading Democrats are pessimistic about its current prospects.

On Saturday, the president reiterated that some Republican members of Congress have said they agree with parts of the bill and said it’s time for them to tell him what their proposals are. “And if they’re opposed to this jobs bill, I’d like to know what exactly they’re against,” he continued. “Are they against putting teachers and police officers and firefighters back on the job? Are they against hiring construction workers to rebuild our roads and bridges and schools? Are they against giving tax cuts to virtually every American worker and small business in America?”

Obama singled out people including Kim Faber, who, with her husband, owns a carpet business in New Jersey. “We hang in by a shoestring,” she wrote him, saying her husband worried about the prospects of bounced checks and uses a home loan to ensure they are covered.

She added: “It breaks my husband’s heart when he has to let people go. Pass the bill!”

In a Republican response, a first-term House member from Virginia, Morgan Griffith, renewed the GOP’s call to ease government regulations and said they had become “full-blown barriers to job creation.”

“Of course, we all recognize the need for reasonable regulations to protect the public,” he said. “There are good regulations, for instance, that ensure public safety and protect our environment. But there are also unnecessary and unreasonable regulations that hurt jobs in some of our nation’s most critical industries.”

Griffith, who represents the southwestern corner of Virginia, said House Republicans next week will take up rules affecting cement makers and boilers. With respect to boilers, he said a Dallas-based chemical manufacturer, Celanese, may scale back or close a plant employing hundreds in his district if the boiler regulations advanced.