Political Quotes

“Well, first, I want to thank my colleague from West Virginia for holding this colloquy today. I enjoyed listening to Senator Capito, his colleague from West Virginia, talk about it, and I know Senator Brown was here. Senator Warner, from Virginia, was out there at the rally just before me. I get to follow him again. What I said the other day when we were at the rally was that this is not a partisan issue. This is one where you have Republicans and Democrats coming together to identify a real problem: 100,000 miners having their pensions endangered and 20,000 miners potentially losing their health care at the end of this year. That is a really urgent problem for them. He did a good job today of talking about some of these issues. I loved when Senator Manchin talked about the fact that this country was built on an energy economy that included coal. I will tell you, we have mined 4 billion tons of coal in Ohio. We are still a State and a country that depends on coal for our electricity. In Ohio, it is about 58 percent of us who turn on a light when we go home and get our electricity from coal. So it is incredibly important for our economy and has built this country, in effect. It has given us in Ohio the ability, frankly, to attract a lot of industry because we have had relatively low energy prices, stable energy prices.…”