On the recordJanuary 29, 2014
My colleague's point, that this used to be a bipartisan issue, is actually illustrated by this photograph. This is Roy Carpenter's Beach. It is a beach that got probably hit the hardest. There were some bigger, older houses that got washed away down the shore, but this has a lot of these smaller houses that families have held onto for generations. After Sandy, with the sea level rise and then the storm, together, they knocked them into the water this way. This individual right here is Lincoln Chafee. That is Governor Chafee. He served in this body as a Republican, and he was one of the staunchest environmentalists in this body. If you go back further, his father John Chafee served as the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. He was one of my colleague's predecessors, and he helped lead the passage of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, a Republican, and he was proud of it. He didn't hide from it. It wasn't something the Republican Party had to run away from in those days. Try to find that in the modern Republican Party. It is embarrassing what has happened to a great political party.
