Joe Manchin: “let me say to the Senator that that question has been out there, and the naysayers are saying we should not delay it…”

“let me say to the Senator that that question has been out there, and the naysayers are saying we should not delay it longer or extend it any more. This has gone through a real storied past, if you will. It had been repealed by previous administrations, it had gone through a court system and was overturned, and we are back where we are. They are going to say: Well, some of them have complied and some haven't. There is ample time. We can sit here--and we have talked and we have watched, in the last year, the blame game. That doesn't work. We haven't fixed a thing in this body this year by blaming the other side or blaming a previous administration or some other partisan group. We have a chance, with what the Senator and I have teamed up on, to fix this. The only thing I would say, which the Senator eloquently laid out, is that a 2-year extension on one to comply, not just to extend and forgive--we are not asking to reduce in any way possible or to amend the Clean Air Act. We want it in force, and we want to do it with the energy we have used for the last century--it is domestic, and it is a fossil fuel. We have cleaned up the air in West Virginia by putting scrubbers and SCRs on boilers to the tune of 89 percent within the last two decades. We can do a lot more. What we are allowing now is to bring plants into compliance without shocking the system.…”