Political Quotes

“This is an important debate. I have been on the Energy and Commerce Committee a long time. I am the ranking member on the Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee which has jurisdiction on this. We are in this debate today because emotion is trumping science. We are not willing to give the scientific community enough time to say that this class of chemicals is bad. We want to do something we have never done. We want to legislatively ban a chemical by legislative fiat, not by doing the due diligence of the scientific process. I got lectured last night. We get lectured all the time about how Republicans don't believe in science on the climate change debate. Well, then the contrary is true. Democrats don't believe in science to allow us to have an adequate debate on these chemicals. When we come to the floor, we talk about PFAS like it is one chemical. PFAS stands for perfluorinated or polyfluorinated compounds. There are over 7,800 of these types of compounds. Some are long-chain compounds; some are small-chain compounds, and they are in every aspect of our life. In fact, the FDA has approved PFAS for food container linings. Let me get that right. Things that are touching our food, the FDA has evaluated it and said, this packaging material is safe. But no, that is not good enough for my colleagues, because emotion, which we operate on here, especially on the floor of the House--I taught history and the Constitution, and we are supposed to be the emotive body.…”