Political Quotes

“I come to talk about the process that we are in here; first of all, the process that brings us the legislation that is before us. Now, I respect my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have come together to draft the legislation that we have been debating on and off, voting even less, but that process shortchanges, I think, the Senate and the American people. It is a process that our colleagues--well-intentioned and working incredibly hard but had no geographic diversity, had no ethnic diversity, had no racial diversity, and that is consequential. It is consequential in the legislation that we are dealing before us. For example, this legislation does very well in taking care of dealing with abandoned mines, but it doesn't do all that well with dealing with Superfund sites--the sites that most Americans who happen to be from disadvantaged communities ultimately reside along. This legislation does much to help with the challenges of wildfires in our country, which I support, but doesn't do very much for the questions of flooding--flooding that takes place along the Mississippi, flooding that takes place in Louisiana, flooding that takes place in my home State of New Jersey and along the Atlantic coast. So that lack of diversity is not only consequential in terms of the legislation--geographic, ethnic, and racial--it is also consequential to disadvantaged communities.…”