Political Quotes

“While our friend from Idaho is trying to leave the Senate floor, I want to say that the Congress did act. Harry Truman said the only thing that is new in the world is the history we never learned or forgot. The Congress did act with a Republican President, a guy named George Herbert Walker Bush. It was passed overwhelmingly in the House and in the Senate and supported, as I recall, by those of us here on the Senate floor today. I will go over a little history here. In 1990, the Clean Air Act said: Look, there are problems with toxic air emissions. We are not sure where they are coming from, but let's spend a little bit of time and have the EPA figure it out. They spent 10 years trying to figure it out. In the last year of the Clinton administration, the conclusion was reached that a lot of the toxic air emissions such as mercury, arsenic, heavy metals, acid gases, come from utilities. A lot comes from utilities. In 2001, the brandnew Bush administration said: Well, let's go to work and figure out what to do about it. Five years later in 2005, the Bush administration said: Here is a rule to deal not with the 70 toxic emissions but with one, mercury. Just one. Immediately lawsuits were filed, and in 2008 the Federal courts said: What about the other 70 toxins? They didn't do anything about the other 70 toxins. What they did with mercury was a cap-and-trade system which doesn't work for mercury. The courts remanded it to the EPA and said: Let's try that again.…”