Frank Pallone: “I appreciate that, and I particularly wanted to mention how you highlighted clean water, and I think that is a very good…”

“I appreciate that, and I particularly wanted to mention how you highlighted clean water, and I think that is a very good example of what the Republican leadership has done in this Congress. My district in New Jersey, a large part of it is on the water, either on the Raritan River, the Raritan Bay or the Atlantic Ocean, and we were the part of the State that was most severely impacted in the late 1980's when the medical waste and other debris washed up on our shores and basically put an end to our tourism season in the summer. The beaches were closed. The people did not come down. It took about, I would say, 4 or 5 years before the Jersey shore recovered and people were back in full force and the water was clean. And basically that was because of the efforts in this Congress and on a bipartisan basis then, Democrats and Republicans, to try to pass some very strong laws that forbade ocean dumping that put medical waste tracking systems in place and essentially made it more difficult for polluters to drop; you know, to discharge items into the rivers, harbors and bays that would eventually come down to the Jersey shore. I would hate to see, and I know that my constituents would hate to see, a situation where, because of the relaxation of these laws or the improper enforcement of these laws, that we went back to the beach closings that we had in some cases now 7, 8 years ago.”