George Voinovich

I will not support General Kagan's nomination. I did not come to this decision lightly. ... I have determined General Kagan at this time does not meet the criteria for membership on our Nation's highest Court.

I was encouraged by how the Department is addressing the great challenge posed by the simultaneous drawdown in Iraq and surge in Afghanistan.

The American people finally are realizing that last year, out of every dollar we spent, we borrowed 41 cents.

I think in the whole Department of Homeland Security, for example, the question was, are they moving forward, are they making progress, in integrating the Department's functions?

There is going to be a lot more scrutiny about what you are doing, how efficient you are, what are you doing with your budget.

Yes, and the other thing I am interested in knowing if you are not able to hit your targets, is it because you are not getting the budget support that you are supposed to be getting from the Department, or are we doing something over here…

I would really like to know from the time that former Under Secretary of Defense Ken Krieg was involved just what we have accomplished.

I would encourage you to get together a little bit more and try to dot the ``i''s and cross the ``t''s and move ahead.

I think if we can move incrementally forward to tighten the Transport Rule or to pass the legislation that you and Senator Carper have been working on and crafting, we can meet a lot of the objectives that we have been working on for over…

If Congress passes a climate bill then industry knows with greater certainty what the future holds.

The point is that the issue here is that you have States that feel that they are being penalized because other States aren't doing what they are supposed to be doing.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was to put Christine Todd Whitman in charge of the environment.

But quite frankly, your State is contributing to my State's non-attainment. And you are causing jobs to flee my State.

I would be interested in knowing how many other States find themselves in the predicament that you do.

What impact, if any, has this had on Ohio's economy and on its ratepayers?

I know we wanted to get the ambient air standards taken care of as soon as possible.

I would appreciate it if you would share that with my office.

I sometimes look at the emphasis that we are placing on greenhouse gas emissions because that is an international problem that we can impact upon.

One of the observations that I have had even most recently is the issue of the various positions taken by utilities depending on the percentage of energy generated.

We are concerned with the concept that each time USEPA promulgates a new, more restrictive air quality standard USEPA intends to revise the Interstate Transport Rule by changing the emission budgets.

But I think it is worth it to try and get it done.

My experience has been over the years--we could have done a 3-P bill 6 years ago.

There has to be some kind of meeting of the minds if we expect to get it done.

The EPA assumption that this unit would be scrubbed by 2011 is completely infeasible and inaccurate.

Moreover, additional time is necessary to coordinate installation of major pollution control equipment during spring and fall outage schedules to ensure reliability of the entire utility system.