Obama to Submit Jobs Plan to Congress Monday
President Barack Obama will make a pitch for his new jobs bill at a Rose Garden ceremony with his supporters Monday morning, and then send the text of the proposal to Congress at night.
Obama will announce at a ceremony at the White House Rose Garden that he will submit the American Jobs Act to Congress when both houses come back into session at night, according to a White House official.
“He will call on Congress to pass the bill, which contains the kinds of proposals to grow the economy and create jobs that have been supported by both parties in the past,” Politico quoted the official as saying.
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At the Rose Garden ceremony, Obama will have a gathering of potential beneficiaries of the proposed legislation, including teachers, police officers, firefighters, construction workers, small business owners and veterans.
Obama plans to travel across the United States to garner support for the $447 billion jobs bill he unveiled Thursday night, the official added.
The bill contains targeted tax cuts, infrastructure spending and new job training assistance. To fund the measures, Obama wants to increase the $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.
The proposal includes spending $25 billion on school infrastructure to modernize nearly 35,000 public schools, adding computer labs and other upgrades, as well as an additional $35 billion to prevent the layoffs of up to 280,000 teachers and to hire thousands more.
Obama on Friday spoke at the University of Richmond in Virginia to gain some support prior to the submission of the bill. “This has been a terrible recession,” the president was quoted as saying. “You expect action, and you deserve it right now.”
However, winning the approval of Congressional Republicans will be the real test for Obama. After the president announced the jobs proposal in a speech at a joint session of Congress Thursday night, Republicans said they were disappointed.
House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, for example, told Fox News he was disappointed because Obama’s remarks seemed to resonate with what most Republicans were saying. “Whatever we do in a jobs bill, we have to pay for it,” he said. “The president tasked the so-called ‘super’ committee to find additional cuts elsewhere in the budget.”
In his Thursday speech, Obama said, “The people of this country work hard to meet their responsibilities. The question tonight is whether we’ll meet ours. The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy, whether we can restore some of the fairness and security that has defined this nation since our beginning.”
To sell his jobs plan, Obama will travel to Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday, and Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina on Wednesday.
