Jeff Merkley

Most importantly for the Nation's small home builders, Congress, regulators, and financial institutions must work to unblock acquisition development and construction lending channels.

Even when we push and one gets changed, it seems like something else changes a few months later on some other piece of it.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanted to jump in on this cost question...

I think it is important we look at that type of comparison, so that we have an unbiased understanding of how these different sources work over the long term.

Mr. Danner, as I mentioned, the levelized cost is a metric...

If you look at prior to that, sometimes, indeed, company stock was the default, often it was stable value.

I have had one concern about the default sign-up. That is, how a company goes about setting out the default allocation of the funds that are being saved.

This is near and dear to my heart because when I was the director of a non-profit I wanted to encourage all my employees to start with the assumption that they would sign up and then decide later if they wanted to opt out.

I believe EPA has now delegated to the State of Oregon responsibility for enforcing that part of the Clean Water Act.

I appreciate the work of the EPA on helping to establish an appropriate testing regime for cryptosporidium.

I appreciate the rigorous scientific process that you are going through to try to reach a decision that is correct for the health of citizens in our Nation.

I think what the Senator from New Mexico has set forward is that we would save 28 hours on each nomination. If the Senate goes around the clock, that is a bit more than a day. If we are doing 10-hour days, that is almost 3 days. We save 3…

I had an amendment I wanted to present that would have taken some of the money in that bill that was being spent in a fashion which created very few jobs and to spend it in a fashion which would create a lot of jobs. I had another proposal…

It is not only secret to the public, it is often secret to fellow Senators, greatly complicating our effort to dialog with fellow Senators as to why we are pursuing something and get their partnership in it.

If a colleague is going to place a hold, they are going to do so in a public and accountable fashion and that would greatly improve the quality of ballot. I have been in the position of trying to get help for the Klamath Basin in Oregon…

The Senator from New Mexico is telling me it has become a common practice on the floor of the Senate for an individual Senator who wants to oppose something to not have the courage to stand here and tell the world their position but…

A supermajority of the Senate, after 1 week of debate, is required just to get to the point where we might start debate on the bill, and the Senate wastes weeks and weeks debating whether to debate rather than doing the people's business…

There are many, many approaches other than a short-term transfer onto the working Americans of health care costs.

We have proposed, the Senators who have put this forward have proposed having a Department of Energy Security...

Four Senators have put out a plan as a bill that lays out a pathway to reducing our consumption of oil by over 8 million barrels per day.

What has been missing, in my thinking, is for the Department of Energy to lay out a plan for how we are going to end our dependence on foreign oil.

Do we have a major challenge as a Nation in which we are spending too much money on foreign wars and foreign bases rather than on domestic infrastructure and domestic education?

Are we as a Nation spending too much on foreign wars and foreign bases rather than on education and infrastructure?

I just want to share with you that, as I do my every county townhalls, it comes up time and time again that these school districts, they cannot even track the opportunities available let alone apply for them.

Isn't that kind of a sign of something massively wrong in our national education system?