Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise to speak about the freight division of the DRIVE Act, the highway transportation bill that is under consideration before us at the moment. The freight provisions represent the combined efforts of both the Commerce Committee, which I have the honor of chairing, and the Committee on Environment and Public Works. To create this division, we incorporate a number of provisions from legislation offered by Senator Cantwell, Senator Markey, Senator Booker, Senator Murray, and the administration's GROW AMERICA Act proposal. We worked very hard to incorporate and make this a bipartisan product. We took into consideration suggestions that were made by our colleagues, many of whom serve on the Commerce Committee and some who don't, but we got to a point where we feel as if we had a good product that incorporates the best ideas--not everything, obviously, that everybody wanted but that addressed many of the issues that pertained to our particular part of this legislation. The language included in the Commerce Committee's freight program also drew from recommendations made by the Department of Transportation's nonpartisan National Freight Advisory Committee-- another entity we looked to and consulted with respect to these particular provisions of the bill. Because of our Nation's vast transportation network, freight can move by rail, it can move by aircraft, it can move by truck, and it can move by ship. It is multimodal.…”