I speak for the first time from the Senate floor with a simple message: The world is growing ever more dangerous and our defense spending is wholly inadequate to confront the danger. To be exact: During the last four or five years the…

If our goal is to convince the American public that we are going to achieve some kind of fiscal sanity...only on the discretionary side of the budget, the public is going to be terribly misled.

I am a big believer that the sequestration is a mindless approach, a lazy man's way to effect some kind of budgeting outcome.

The provision helps clarify that farmers are allowed to engage in normal agricultural practices that have added the benefit of providing habitat for ducks.

I am an engineer and a forester, and I disagree with you, and I can tell you that raising these standards will hurt this sector of the economy, which will, in essence, hurt the air quality overall.

Even though there are studies that show that poverty is related to indoor air pollution, which is correlated with asthma? You have totally disregarded the effect of employment, and jobs, and poverty on your cost analysis?

Do EPA's health effects include the negative health effects of employment cost?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I would request unanimous consent to submit a study from the Institute for Energy Research.

The ozone rule will drive up costs in the forestry and forest products industry, which will result in closed facilities, which will mean less jobs, less carbon sequestration, more poverty, and more asthma.

So if regulators should be able to see the emails within a broker-dealer, shouldn't we would be able to see all the emails in an Executive Branch agency?

What about in the case of the forest products industry, where you have a very green material that is good for the environment, yet these standards are going to hurt the industry, which will cost jobs, which will close down facilities…

Well, if we take cost out of the equation, and just use the science of air quality, these regulations will negatively impact air quality because they will remove operations that ultimately add to the cleanness of the air.

But if you could conclude, and I am not trying to speculate that that is a conclusion that you would come up with, but if one could reasonably conclude that this is a form of activism that is being used in a very prominent program, I am…

If LEED were to go down this path, if we can agree--or at least I will maintain that they are on a path of overregulation and extreme environmental activism--do you anticipate that there could come a day when GSA would cease to accept the…

I don't have a real good, warm and fuzzy feeling on this particular project.

We are not going to appreciably change the trajectory of the course we are on right now unless and until we deal with the mandatory side of spending.

I think what makes me hopeful is that there has been bipartisan agreement on that.

Why did it take sequestration to force the Federal Government to practice efficiency?