Political Quotes

“what the gentleman is arguing is prospective legislation could have provisions in it that would deal with this problem. But I do want to point out that the existing legislation before us today says that under existing laws if EPA adopts a regulation to enforce the law that regulation has to be pursuant to an analysis as well, and then the agency would go forward with the regulation, and that can be tied up in court. So what the gentleman has argued and the gentleman from New Mexico [Mr. Schiff] has argued ideally does not apply to that kind of circumstance. Under the existing clean water law, under the existing Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, whenever we have an interstate problem, whenever we have a regulation that is promulgated to enforce that law that is already on the books, that could be tied up in courts by the polluter, who would then not want the regulations to go into effect, and they would tie it up on the basis of perhaps the analysis was not done as thoroughly as it may otherwise have been done. They do not even have to have a lot of merit on their side to tie something up in court for a long time, during which a great deal of damage would be done.”