Political Quotes

“Mr. President, the reason ``I came to speak on the floor [right now is to talk] about an issue that many in Washington would prefer to ignore; that is, [the] climate changes that are being caused by our carbon pollution.'' That is how I began these speeches, with that sentence, on April 18, 2012, from this desk. I have returned week after week to try to make sure there would not be silence in the Senate on the climate crisis. This is my 199th weekly foray; next week will make it an even 200. Back on that April Wednesday in 2012, debate about climate change had all but died in Congress. Just a few years prior, the House of Representatives had passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, led by our colleague, now the Senator from Massachusetts. In this body, Republican colleagues had openly acknowledged the existence of climate change and called for legislative action to cut carbon emissions. Since John Chafee, climate change had been a bipartisan concern. In 2010, came the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision, which allowed the fossil fuel industry to unleash limitless dark money on our elections. The polluters' money and threats cast a shadow across any Republican who might work on carbon pollution, and it ended that bipartisanship. When I gave that first speech, even the White House had thrown in the towel on climate change, after letting Waxman-Markey die on the vine.…”