John Sarbanes

Climate change is real. The need to protect the environment is real.

I spoke out early and forcefully about the unnecessary effort by Speaker Pelosi to create a separate, select committee which lacks any legislative authority.

If you just do one and you don't do the others, we're still frozen out; the system is still rigged.

This is not theater. We're trying to set the table on the democracy, make people feel more empowered.

People are sick and tired of being sick and tired, to use Fannie Lou Hamer's words, at a system that is run by somebody else.

Because when you step into that system, you step into a system that is owned by the people.

H.R. 1 kicks off what I hope will be a wave of reform.

We now find ourselves in an ethics crisis. The trigger was President Trump's refusal to divest his conflicting financial interests.

The American people gave this Congress and this committee a mandate to restore our democracy and cleanup our government.

In my 14 years there, I have been intimately involved in protecting the principle that public service is a public trust.

We need to try to address that and break those dependencies.

I think many of our constituents would say that, too often, Congress is leaning in the direction of the big money and the special interests and away from the interests of the broad public.

One of the reasons it is difficult to do that is because these industries have a lot of influence on how policy gets made.

What worries me is this is all part of a campaign by the GOP and the right wing to work the refs--complaining of non-existent bias to force and over correction.

But what is really frustrating to me about today's inquiry is that my Republican colleagues know there are plenty of other kinds of investigations that we should be undertaking in this Congress but they don't have any interest in pursuing…

I appreciate that. Just to close, I would say that, within that larger construct, it can be frustrating sometimes.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank the panel for your testimony. Very important pieces of legislation that we are discussing today. All have earned bipartisan support for obvious reasons, given what you have been telling us and, I…

Thank you for your work to implement 21st Century Cures, which obviously as you know is a point of real pride for this committee.

I commend you for that. I have just introduced in the last few days something we are calling the biosimilars competition act.

We need to know in real-time that the alerts are being--that the threats are being taken seriously.

Based on the experience with what happened with some of the 21 States last time and the way the alert was given but then it seemed like the Federal folks, in a sense, kind of walked away from the enterprise, I didn't have as much…

These mergers are kind of out of control. They're putting the consumer, really, in a very, very bad position.

I agree with you and I think we do need to make sure the big guys receive the same kind of attention as the small guys.

I will be introducing soon the Biosimilars Competition Act of 2018 to grant FTC that authority.

I think there's a study out there that shows that while brand name drugs are about 10 percent of all drugs that are dispensed, I think that's including biologics in the equation, they make up about 72 percent of the annual U.S. drug…