Political Quotes

“I yield myself the balance of my time to close. Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot of false science today, which is appropriate since the agency that concocted this rule refused to allow any of the data they used to make the rule to be made public. We asked for it. We asked for it in legislation. They simply refused to comply. Ninety-three percent of the sites are not having any impact on the streams, and the other seven percent we already had rules that covered them that did this protection. There is no real new protection in this particular act. The States, which regulate 97 percent of the coal mines in the United States, were shut out of the process, which is why they are suing over it. This rule undercuts the State primacy that was provided in the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. What we are doing here today with this effort is to reestablish the article I authority that we have in the Constitution by saying we are responsible for the policy, not some agency of the executive branch. Adopting this resolution protects the rights of States tasked with regulating the coal industry in their borders, and it also actually helps people. People are going to be harmed if this act is not repealed and actually goes into effect, and the most vulnerable of our populations are the ones who will suffer the most because of it.…”