Joe Barton: “this policy built upon the 1994 statutory interpretation memorandum that we have just put into the Record. And it…”

“this policy built upon the 1994 statutory interpretation memorandum that we have just put into the Record. And it indicated that the EPA considered its bump-up policy to be a fair reading of the act. Now, what happened after this 1994 memorandum and the 1998 Federal Register, no Member of Congress complained about that. There was no group of citizens that came to the Congress and complained about the Clinton administration proposal. But what did happen was that in 2002, the Sierra Club filed three different lawsuits in three different regions, one of them here in the D.C. Circuit, one in the 5th Circuit, and one in the 7th Circuit, and they really did not argue against the policy of flexibility. They simply said the Clean Air Act did not give the EPA that authority. It was a very technical argument. And, to their credit, the Sierra Club's argument was upheld by the courts. The courts said, ``We have read the Clean Air Act and it is ambiguous. And since it is ambiguous, we have to say no to flexibility because it does not explicitly state there can be flexibility.'' That was in 2002. Those were lawsuits filed by the Sierra Club that went to court. So we now fast forward to 2003. The gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Tauzin), the distinguished chairman of the full committee, and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton), a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, all worked with me and other members of the committee on a bipartisan basis.…”