Political Quotes

“I join my colleague from Alaska, the chair of the Senate Energy Committee, to urge my colleagues today to move forward on going to conference on the Energy bill. My colleagues will remember we passed a bill 85 to 12, I think it was, and included a great deal of provisions on--my colleague just said--modernizing the electricity grid, building next-generation investments in energy, smart buildings, advanced composite materials, energy storage and improving cyber security, critical infrastructure, and the energy workforce for tomorrow. This was a very worked-over process, both in committee and on the Senate floor, and it was a very collaborative effort among our colleagues on both sides of the aisle. It did take some discussion with our House colleagues because the package they passed was a very different product. I will say, it was a very less worked product on a bipartisan basis and certainly a product that had a lot of veto threats in it. Our House colleagues have made some comments about that legislation that have made it helpful for us to move forward. We met with our colleagues, the Natural Resources and Energy Committee chairs, Mr. Bishop and Mr. Upton. They basically said: Look, they didn't want to waste time on things that would be vetoed by the President of the United States, so we took that as a good sign that they were willing to sit down and talk about legislation that could move forward in a positive fashion.…”