Political Quotes

“That is exactly right. I thank the Senator from Oregon for his good question, because that is exactly right. We need some mechanism to make sure we are consistent and coherent and cohesive in our energy policy in the country. Things change. That is why you want to do this about every 4 years. You do not need to do it every year. It is too much work and too much going on. But just as with the Department of Defense, things change. What happens is you get a benchmark from 4 years ago that suddenly you have a good comparison. You have a baseline that you can look back to 4 years ago and see if you are making progress, if your policy is going in the right direction. Maybe in this case we have a lot of energy programs that are not working very well. This will help us identify those. Maybe we have some that are working great, that we ought to be spending more money on. This will help us identify those. I do thank the Senator for his question. I do see we have other Senators coming to the floor. Let me talk very quickly about one other amendment I have. It is the voluntary certification program, here again, bipartisan, working with Senator Sessions. It is amendment No. 1879. This is a very specific amendment for some very specific industries: heating, cooling, commercial refrigeration and water-heating products. This is not economywide. This is very specific to those industries. But right now what they do is they self-certify. They self-certify.…”