Political Quotes

“Madam President, while Senator Grassley is on the floor, I would thank him for his remarks about the First Step Act and let him know that on the Judiciary Committee, I look forward to working with him to continue to advance that. As the Senate knows, the Grassley-Durbin segment and the Cornyn- Whitehouse segment were the two key pieces of that bill, and it is terrific to hear the Senator and our chairman at the time chose support to continue that work. So I am grateful. What I would like to do now is to follow the conversation we had about oceans a minute ago in the context of my ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches. Obviously, the oceans are taking a colossal beating from climate change, from the warming, from the chemical acidification that it causes. It is warming at a rate of multiple detonations of Hiroshima- level nuclear weapons per second in the ocean. That is the amount of heat that is added, if you want to put an image to it. So we have done some good things on oceans in this Congress, and I would like to summarize some of those. One, obviously, is Save Our Seas 2.0 that Senator Sullivan, Senator Menendez, and I just discussed, but we also have a little package of enforcement provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act that focus on what is commonly called illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing--IUU fishing--which is a really boring and bureaucratic name for extremely bad behavior.…”