Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from New Hampshire and my colleague from Ohio, Senators Shaheen and Portman, for their work on this legislation. As my colleague from New Hampshire has said, unfortunately this is a piece of legislation that is being blocked. As we saw on the floor, we don't even know the reason it is being blocked. I think, when we have an objection on the Senate floor, we should have to come to the floor and state what our objection is. So here we are. We are going to again ask for this legislation to be brought forward that passed overwhelmingly in the House and in fact has overwhelming support from both the business community and environmental groups. If the Tenant Star provision is what is being raised--we are not quite sure what the objection is because we haven't heard here publicly. This program is supported not only by commercial landowners but also tenants, the business community, and environmental groups. What it does is establish a market-based approach that is not a mandate but encourages both the commercial owners and tenants to be able to create a voluntary Tenant Star certification to encourage commercial tenants to implement cost measures that will help reduce energy consumption. Energy efficiency is a bipartisan way we can reduce energy costs, we can protect our environment, and we can ensure that we don't have to be dependent on countries overseas. It is about security of this country too.…”