Political Quotes

“If the Senator will yield for one moment, I also want Senator Hoeven to understand the history. Shortly after the Supreme Court decision many of us filed because there needed to be clarification. We had urged Congress to do that. But it was opposition from the Republicans that prevented us from considering that legislation. They blocked us from considering a congressional clarification as to the Supreme Court decision, and now we are faced with a situation in which the administration is doing what it must do; that is, to provide, under its own authority, where it can act, clarification that it so desperately needed. As Senator Whitehouse has said, what this regulation is about is clarifying the confusion by the Supreme Court decision as to what is regulated or not. As a result, landowners don't know whether they can do this or not. They don't know. That is the worst of all worlds, when you don't have certainty as to how you need to act, and that does cause speculation that in many cases is not true. But they don't know what the rules are. So, quite frankly, what the administration rule is patterned after is a lot of discussion we had in the Congress of the United States shortly after the Supreme Court decision as to trying to codify the practice before the Supreme Court decision. There didn't seem to be a lot of people upset with the manner in which the EPA was regulating the waters of the United States prior to the two Supreme Court decisions in 2001.…”