John Spratt: “I offer this as a perfecting amendment so that H.R. 5 will not apply to the regulation, to any regulation, with respect…”

“I offer this as a perfecting amendment so that H.R. 5 will not apply to the regulation, to any regulation, with respect to the generation, transportation, storage or disposal of toxic, hazardous or radioactive substances. Mr. Chairman, 2 weeks ago some 1,800 containers of hazardous waste, waiting to be incinerated in my district, caught fire and burned out of control, burned so intensely that they virtually melted the metal building in which they were contained. This waste came to Rock Hill, South Carolina, from Fishkill, New York. Eighty to ninety percent of all the wastes that comes to this particular incinerator comes down the eastern seaboard or up the eastern seaboard from out of state to this location, and there is precious little South Carolina can do about regulating the inflow of that waste because virtually any regulation we try to impose pretty quickly runs into the interstate commerce clause or into Supreme Court decisions like New Jersey versus Philadelphia in a case called 'Don't Dump on Washington.'”