Floor Speeches

Mr. Chairman, our country is facing an incredibly important moment as critical decisions need to be made regarding the national debt and our long-term deficit and how to constrain spending. Members on both sides of this aisle recognize the reality that we need to restore fiscal responsibility in our budget.

However, Mr. Chairman, in times of national importance, we need to stay focused on what our country needs and what's best for the American people and avoid the temptation to play politics, as this bill does.

Far too much has been carried out by the majority party under the guise of cutting the deficit and fiscal responsibility when it's actually policy-making to implement a hard right, radical, anti-environmental agenda which can actually cost more money in the short, medium, and long term.

Mr. Chairman, the cuts proposed by the majority in this bill have nothing to do with fiscal responsibility. They have everything to do with implementing radical anti-environmental ideology. The bill makes sweeping cuts to critical programs that protect the public's health, reduce our expenditures for health care, protect our environment, and keep industry from running over the public and consumer rights.

Yet at the same time it does that, Mr. Chairman, this bill actually increases spending on programs that are little more than handouts and subsidies to oil and gas companies and mining companies, in particular, one that the government waste watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense has called ``the granddaddy of Federal subsidies.'' This isn't about saving taxpayer money in this bill; it's about slashing environmental protections while giving handouts and subsidizing the dirtiest, most influential industries.

There's more pork in this bill than in an Iowa hog lot. This is supposed to be a spending bill that attempts to balance various budget priorities against one another. It's not supposed to be a grab bag of provisions demanded by the Nation's worst polluters, energy companies, and other special interests who receive handouts under this bill.

Yes, this bill would do away with the Clean Water Act, putting the rest of us in danger because mountaintop coal mining companies and factory farms want it. This bill does away with key provisions of the Clean Air Act, undermines protections of our public lands, and repeals the Endangered Species Act to satisfy a few at the expense of the many.

The bill will put more toxic mercury, arsenic, and lead into our air and put our children's health at risk by blocking standards to cut toxic air pollution from cement kilns, allow more soot pollution in our air, block EPA from moving forward with carbon pollution standards for new vehicles after 2016, jeopardizing a process projected to create up to 700,000 new jobs and save 2.4 million barrels of oil every day by 2030.

States would also be blocked from moving ahead with their own clean car standards, threatening the health of America's children, elderly citizens, and other vulnerable populations by blocking EPA's ability to limit dangerous carbon pollution from power plants and other large stationary sources.

This bill also expedites uranium mining in the Grand Canyon, gives special legal exemption to grazing on public lands, eliminates endangered species protections for animals from big horned sheep to grey wolves, and more. Yet it increases spending for the 1879 mining law and other elements that actually threaten to endanger our environment and are an additional handout to Big Oil.

Mr. Chairman, this bill isn't a serious funding proposal. It's a polluter's wish list of subsidies, handouts, and pork. The majority can call it what they will, but don't say that this bill serves the cause of cut-cutting while it lards up programs that are little more than a subsidy to wealthy mining and drilling interests.

I yield back the balance of my time.