President Barack Obama’s jobs bill is even worse when you look at the details than it is at first glance, according to four-term Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert.
“It is a disaster,” the Texas representative said in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview. And the whole bill should have been renamed from “The American Jobs Act” to either “The Save Obama’s Job Act” or “The Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Full Employment Bill,” he added.
Gohmert pointed to little-noticed aspects of the bill that Obama presented to Congress on Monday. One, he said, turns the unemployed into a protected class similar to ethnic minorities.
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“If you apply for a job and you think that the reason you didn’t get hired is because you were unemployed at the time, you¹re now a protected class,” said Gohmert, whose largely rural district borders Louisiana. “You’ve now got a cause of action, go get a lawyer.
“How do you prove, if you’re an employer, that being unemployed was not the reason that you did not hire somebody. It is going to create all kinds of claims for this mass of people and there’ll be more and more unemployed because of this bill.
“This is a job killer except for famous lawyers who do labor work, they¹re going to have a field day,” Gohmert said. “Anybody that¹s unemployed who doesn’t get hired is going to have a claim, a cause of action. But everybody else is going to be in big trouble.”
Gohmert said he got the text of the bill on Monday evening and spent much of the night studying it. His analysis is that the real losers would be small businesses.
Taking the oil and gas industry, he said it would help huge corporations such as British Petroleum and Exxon Mobil while hurting the small independent companies that provide much of the energy produced in the United States.
What Obama calls subsidies for the oil industry that he wants to eliminate are really the same tax deductions that all companies get, Gohmert said.
“They’re deductions of the cost of doing business. Every manufacturer, every employer gets to deduct the cost of doing business, but this president wants to make sure oil companies don¹t, and who¹s going to be helped? The biggest oil companies will be helped. The price of oil, if this becomes law, will go up.”
Obama’s whole concept of the role of government is wrong, Gohmert said. “One of the things that was the scariest to me in the whole speech he gave, he said he wanted government working side by side with business.
“That is not the government’s role. Businesses don¹t need the government as a partner. They need the government as a referee to make sure the playing field is level, keep things fair and then get out of the way.”
Another little-noticed part of the bill is the establishment of the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. That, he said, “will hurt the country in more ways than you can imagine.”
Then there is the clause that, he claimed, undermines the 11th Amendment by saying that any state that accepts federal money under its auspices automatically waives its right to sovereign immunity.
“You accept $1 of federal money for any program in your state, you’ve waived your right not to be sued for not hiring somebody because they’re unemployed.
Gohmert predicted the bill would “stimulate the economy almost as much as the last stimulus bill stimulated the economy.
“It drove unemployment from below 8 up over 10 and it’s over 9 now. He assured us, though, that if we did not pass this stimulus bill, unemployment might go as high, he said, as 8.5. That 8.5 percent looks pretty good right now.”
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