Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. It is interesting to me that my colleagues on the other side take offense to this being referred to as a midnight rule. This is actually a midnight rule twice. Let's look at how this thing started. In 2005, during the Bush administration, 5 years of effort went into codifying how coal mining operations should take place around streams. The last President announced, during his campaign, that he was going to make coal-fired energy financially, economically impossible, thereby launching his war on coal. There was a lawsuit with the Bush-era rule. The Interior Department and the administration settled, paying that settlement out of taxpayer dollars and then launching an effort to rewrite that rule. In 2011 when we came in, they were planning to release that rule in April of 2011. What took 5 years to codify, they wanted to redo in just 4 months. Not only that, but they left the States out of the equation. The States complained about that. No one in the administration was listening. When the contractors then told the truth about how many tens of thousands of jobs were going to be lost as a result of this rule, the administration fired the contractor that was doing the work. Not only that, they paid them in full. Now, go figure.…”