John Sarbanes

Unfortunately, this is not the case, Mr. Pruitt, clearly you do not believe in EPA's mission, and appear to have forgotten that you are here to serve all the American people, not merely a select few, or just yourself.

The U.S. Constitution vests the actual budget and spending authority with the Congress.

I also want to applaud your initiative to look at the EPA's workforce.

I am especially happy with the reinvigorated Superfund program.

The American people don't want ideologues rewriting or reinterpreting law.

Fortunately, committee Democrats have been demanding answers and five independent Federal investigations are now being done into your conduct at our request.

I also want to commend you for reducing the backlog of applications for new chemicals.

I am glad to hear that the regulatory process you are running is not looking to short circuit public comment.

You are accountable for your Agency and all of these scandals. The buck stops at your desk.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Justice delayed is justice denied at all levels.

And I think a lot of Americans are waking up to the fact that Facebook is becoming sort of a self-regulated super structure for political discourse.

The reason this is important and the reason we need to get to the bottom of it is because it could be a serious problem if these kinds of services were provided beyond what is offered in the normal course, because that could result in…

Let me tell you what they were, because I do. President Trump's campaign had an estimated 5.9 million ads approved; and Secretary Clinton, 66,000 ads.

I gather that Mr. Trump's campaign ultimately accepted that offer. Is that correct? Yes or no.

You had suggested in your testimony over the last couple days that Facebook notified the Trump and Clinton campaigns of Russian attempts to hack into those campaigns.

This is a bill that I am very proud to be cosponsoring with Mr. Guthrie on this committee.

I hope that we are not going to start moving in that direction, because it undermines the very principles that were fundamental to the Affordable Care Act and providing a higher level of coverage.

You cannot believe that that is moving in a positive direction.

I want to echo the request that we have some kind of hearing that addresses this issue of gun violence as a public health crisis.

I am talking about a response that says this is a public health crisis and our agency... is going to have to really ramp up the kind of research--public health research--we do into this crisis of gun violence--an epidemic of gun violence…

But we really should be sending them laws that put in place commonsense gun safety measures.

We do have a strategy. We do have a law. We just have failed to implement it. It has really been a political failure, not a scientific failure.

Even the business roundtable has said that we should be looking at existing law, not layer on new laws to the NEPA process.

The FAST Act, based in large part by the Rapid Act promoted by Mr. Shimkus, was passed in 2015.