Political Quotes

“Madam President, we rise together with so many other Members of the Senate on a bipartisan basis to strongly support the chemical safety bill which passed the U.S. House of Representatives with enormous bipartisan support and is ready to pass here in the Senate. This is a long day coming. First, this is an element of Federal law that has been in dire need of updating. All stakeholders--left, right, and middle--have said that for decades. Secondly, we have been working on this specific bill, this solution to that problem, for over 5 years. I started over 5 years ago with what I think we would reasonably characterize as a Republican proposal, in contrast to a clearly Democratic proposal by then-Senator Frank Lautenberg. We had these competing partisan proposals for some time, but in early 2013 we made a very determined effort to try to bridge that divide and come up with a strong bipartisan proposal to achieve two absolutely necessary objectives: one, to make sure we fully protect the health and safety of all Americans with regard to chemicals that are in products we use every day--that is paramount, and that has to happen--and two, to make sure we do it in a way that allows American companies to remain science and innovation leaders in this important sector of our economy. I have to say that when we started these discussions in early 2013, I think both Frank Lautenberg and I were very cynical about our chances of success.…”