Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I would say to my friend--and he is my good friend--that the bill passed unanimously in the Senate. I know he likes to invoke Senator Boxer's name a lot. But the fact of the matter is, every Republican and every Democrat in the United States Senate supported this bill. I would like to make a couple of points. He talks about the lead in the service lines. And that's true, utility companies--and we have literally dozens of utilities that are in support of this bill--are already constantly making efforts to get lead out of their lines. What we are trying to do is not to make that an exercise in futility by allowing the faucets to return the lead into the lines that they are working so hard to take out. We talk about preemption. Right now, the standard is 8 percent, so that's a maximum. And the gentleman is correct: a lot of States have gone under that 8 percent limit. But the new standard that we are proposing, the 0.25 percent, is state of the art. That is about as low as you can get it, based on the technology that we have available today. So in effect, the idea that States would somehow be able to preempt and go below that, it just isn't possible as we speak today. So it sort of deals with the preemption issue. The bill doesn't require people to buy replacements. No one is forced to replace their faucets.…”