I guess as the only Democrat present today I am standing in for our Ranking Member, and I would like to make a brief opening statement, and let me open with a word of gratitude for regulation.

I would suspect that you would find that there are a considerable number of things that both sides could agree on as being unnecessary, burdensome, or obsolete if we did it as a package and tried to put it all together.

the policy goals that Mercatus Center sought to achieve on behalf of its big funders are things that we need not worry about infiltrating your work as CBO Director?

My concern is that in setting the ground rules for the application of dynamic scoring, you might be inclined to set it up in such a way that it favors things that the majority party likes.

Will you treat us fairly in setting up this rule so that it falls on the just and unjust alike, as some would say?

If we are going to address this problem, we need to stop playing favorites.

In making those selections, will you be sure that it can apply fairly to all results, no matter what the desired policy outcome might be by certain interests?

Contrary to what my Republican colleagues claim, this rule is good economic news in Rhode Island and probably across the Country.

The Clean Water Act and clean water regulation has, for always since back when it was a common law doctrine and through the establishment by Congress of the Clean Water Act and through the EPA's administration of that law, had the purpose…

Attacks on this rule from my Republican colleagues have been extreme and seemingly based more on government conspiracy theories than on the actual rule.

The so-called Federal Water Quality Protection Act, an ironic name if there ever was one, would prohibit EPA from finalizing any change to its regulations.

So coastal States like Rhode Island would take the hit.

Once again we are here to consider a Republican attack against environmental protection. It is becoming a recurring theme.

The Tax Code is rigged and riddled with this nonsense.

the budget process has become meaningless, and I am sick of it.

I am from Rhode Island. We are a downstream State. Coastal States are downstream States.

I think I share your frustration with the process that I think we probably all on this Committee feel.

It is just legally wrong.

Again, that damage would fall on the coastal Atlantic States, correct?

I think a lot of us are concerned about where this dynamic scoring issue goes.

Republican concern about the debt and the deficit seems to vary considerably depending on the program at issue.

Without this, we have nothing?

The danger, of course, is that the big, powerful groups that throw their weight around here would try to co-opt that process so that it once again became the Wall Street and Big Polluter Free Ride Act of whatever year it was in.

April 18, 2012, was not the first time I spoke on the Senate floor on the dangers of carbon pollution, but it was the first in the weekly series that brings me here today with my increasingly dog-eared sign. Opponents of responsible…

I am here today for the 99th time to remind us that we are sleepwalking our way to a climate catastrophe, and that it is time to wake up. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States, recently announced an…