Mr. President, I rise today to discuss a matter of importance not just to Arizonans but to the people affected across the country by the Environmental Protection Agency's continuing overreach. Namely, I want to talk about air quality standards that are quite simply unattainable and those that penalize States where Mother Nature--not smokestacks, not factories, not evil industrialists, just Mother Nature--causes these events that affect air quality. Let me say from the outset we all love and deserve to have clean air, and when I am discussing these particular concerns I want to be clear that I am not in favor of pollution, dirty air or asthma. Instead what I am in favor of is a little more common sense from the EPA. It won't come as any surprise to most people that Arizona is a desert State. We have lots of cactus. We have scorpions. I was stung twice last year. In Arizona, just as in most deserts around the world, we have dust storms. These dust storms are not caused by eroding topsoil or overfarming or man. These are naturally occurring events just like tornadoes or blizzards in other parts of the country. When you live in a naturally dusty State, the dust storms sweep across the desert and across State lines. They can obviously cause local and regional air quality issues. The same goes for living in a forest-fire-prone State, which Arizona also is. States simply cannot be expected to control these issues.…
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Just look at what has happened. The attorney general has been fired. And oversight for the investigation has been taken from the deputy attorney general where it belonged.





