On the recordMay 12, 2015
I will take about 3 minutes to talk about my last issue today, and that is the toxic reform bill that passed out of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Mr. President, I have some great news about the toxic bill. The original Vitter-Udall bill was slain and is gone and in its place is a better bill. That is the great news. The bad news is it is still not a really good bill. We have to do better, and we can do better. What we did in this bill is to understand that we had to negotiate certain items out of it, and one of the items we had to negotiate was how far the original bill went in preempting State laws, which we have now addressed. Credit goes to 450 organizations that--although they still oppose this bill--pushed hard for those changes. Credit also goes to Senators Whitehouse, Merkley, and Booker, who told me they wanted to try to negotiate some changes. I blessed them, and they went and did it. For that I have to thank a Senator who is no longer with us, Ted Kennedy. He taught me that, as a chairman, you need to understand that sometimes you have to turn to your colleagues and let them move forward. And I was happy to do that. The changes that came back included a part-way fix on preemption, a full fix on preempting air and water laws when it comes to toxics. And coenforcement has been fixed. So we are very, very pleased. What is not really fixed, however, is that we want to make sure States have even more latitude to move if they see a danger.…
