Mazie Hirono

I think that Josh Hawley is not the one that I want to particularly spend our time on. He didn’t might not want to stand with the AAPI community in condemning these kinds of totally unprovoked attacks on them.

Yes, I agree with you that that is exemplary behavior.

I am for these national kinds of standards that will encourage the private sector to step up.

The National Climate Assessment released in 2018 estimated $500 billion in lost economic output annually by the year 2100 due to global warming at or above two degrees Celsius.

President Biden has laid out his vision of how investing in new clean energy technologies will help build the middle class in America and expand economic opportunity.

That is the question.

Yes, I think if we are looking ahead, we are going to be looking to non-fossil fuel kinds of energy sources.

We have a lot -- a lot of work to do and we were facing basically mindless obstruction from the Republicans.

I know that Joe Manchin wants to get things done for the American people.

He won’t be able to move on any of those areas unless the Republicans support us.

Mitch McConnell is very concerned about us doing filibuster reform, because he knows that there that Democrats will put forth bills that they would want to filibusters such as voting rights.

We know that we have a lot more to do.

I hope that you can provide this Committee with some approaches that we can take, funding or programmatic, to deal with the backlog and the other issues you just mentioned.

Julie Su is highly qualified and is a strong leader.

The Department's mission takes on outsized importance.

Leadership does make a difference and it is important that we support the president in putting together the team he needs.

I do think that there are some commodities such as electricity that are so basic that I do not know if free market is the best system to deliver those necessary commodities.

To have literally hundreds of thousands of people without power for days on end is simply unacceptable?

Well, considering the massiveness of the failure in Texas, I think that they probably did not follow your recommendations very well.

Mitch McConnell wants to be able to uh be the guy that stops all of them. And that is why he`s so intent on keeping filibuster intact.

Understanding that Mitch McConnell`s goal is to retake the senate which means that he is not going to be with us in pushing legislation that Joe Biden wants.

I`m very disappointed that not one Republican voted for it and neither did any Republican in the House.

Oh, I had little doubt that we were going to get this done because all of the Democrats voted to use the reconciliation process.

At the end of the day, although the Republicans tried -- they spent many, many hours trying to weaken the bill and ultimately not a single one voted for it. At the end of the day, we Democrats knew that we were going to get a bill that was…

I think it is really important for this Department to have the staffing necessary because, as you noted, this is a department that should rely on facts, data, and information, in order to make its decisions.