Mike Enzi

Mr. Chairman, I want to welcome you back to the committee and congratulate you on being the first to hold a hearing on President-elect Obama's nominees.

The American people deserve solutions, not just debate.

I know that the members of this committee take the advice and consent clause of the Constitution seriously.

Every independent group that has looked at this... has said that this carbon tax... represents a $300-billion-a-year increase in revenues.

The budget proposes raising the effective tax rate from 35 percent to 41, 42 percent.

The argument that it cuts the deficit in half in 4 years is truly spurious.

I thought that the purpose of cap and trade was to have all of the money that was coming in from whatever was being taxed would go toward the solution of that tax.

Except that we are about to make it a Federal issue and a Federal tax, because we are talking about cap and trade, which is a tax, and that tax will be passed on to the consumer.

I am a huge believer that incentives work better than penalties, although recognizing that sometimes penalties need to be in place because there are bad actors.

I personally believe that we should have been offsetting some of the spending in this stimulus bill today.

Well, we were also told that with the first TARP that that money would go to buy toxic assets.

Nobody in America, I think, believes that we can spend the $700 billion or the $820 billion efficiently.

We also keep talking about being bipartisan, but we do not act bipartisan.

Part of it has been the speed with which we have done things and the size of the things that we have done.

One of the things that has to happen around here is we have to restore confidence in the American people.

This is a budget which has fundamental flaws.

It has been a pleasure and an honor to get to work on this bill and to work with people on both sides of the aisle. You can see the unanimity from the Republican side and the Democratic side in making sure the bill came to pass. As I…

Before we passed the legislation, there were waiting lines in many of the States in this country, lines of people waiting to get treatment and care for AIDS. I am pleased to let you know there are no waiting lines today. No waiting lines…

I, too, thank Senator Alexander for his commitment to students in his State and across the country, and to the public purpose mission of nonprofits, such as EdSouth and, in my home State of Wyoming, the Wyoming Student Loan Corporation. I…

Yes. The language in the bill recognizes that travel in frontier areas, particularly in remote places such as Alaska, can be time-consuming and expensive, so it specifically notes that the training or certification should be available in a…

While I cannot give the Senator a guaranteed time frame, I would point out that the training and certification is specifically for the drug the provider is seeking to prescribe or dispense--not for a range of drugs. Thus, the time frame…

I am hoping that since we did not have a chance on drug importation--and I wish to make the point that that is importation, not reimportation--we didn't have a chance to sit down and work on that and work through it and see what changes…

We have been working on a pedigree and licensure amendment--it is actually structured as a separate bill--in anticipation of trying to add to this when we can find a solution that we feel comfortable with, and we haven't gotten there yet…

I want to commend Senator Hatch for raising this issue of antimicrobial resistance and the need for innovation. The problem that the Senator is addressing here is a real threat to public health. The Director of the CDC reports that more…

Yes, we took great pains to make certain there would be no conflict with DSHEA. Regarding foods, and dietary supplements are generally regulated as foods, the general directive of the Foundation is to identify holes in the evaluation of…