David Schweikert: “That is actually a brilliant way to phrase it. My continuing thought experiment, and this is a little beyond where we…”

“That is actually a brilliant way to phrase it. My continuing thought experiment, and this is a little beyond where we were going, but it makes the point, visit Washington, D.C., or a bunch of other locations now. They are not going to give you a straw or they are going to give you a paper straw. The math is--and this actually, I believe, comes from the United Nations--90 percent of all the plastic in the ocean--and, look, it is a big deal. I am looking at my data here, roughly 8 million tons a year of plastic goes in to the ocean. The gentleman is from a coastal State--comes from 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia, two of them in Africa. If you actually really cared about plastic in the ocean, that 8 million tons, we would actually take our environmental policy, our trade policy, and our foreign aid policy and say that we are going to actually help these 10 rivers that are responsible for 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean and work on those. But instead we do these feel-good, absurd, theatrical things of ``my community isn't going to do straws, don't we feel better that we did something for plastic in the ocean?'' It had nothing to do with plastic in the ocean. It is these 10 rivers. Let's grow up and stop the political theater.”