Water Resources Development Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mrs. CAPITO. Mr. President, I wish to thank my fellow Senator from the State of West Virginia for his lead on this, and I am happy to be his primary cosponsor. I wish to thank Senator Brown as well. He brings a lot of passion. I got to follow him the other day at the rally. He is a hard act to follow. Senator Warner, certainly your State of Virginia and the southwest portion right there--you are lucky enough to be really close to West Virginia--are going to feel a lot of this.

I think Senator Brown really stated it when he spoke about the rally that we saw last week. It was a very hot day. There were thousands of miners and families there, and we all went for the show of hands. Senator Portman is here now. Let's have a show of hands from those from Ohio and from West Virginia. It was really spread throughout the eastern part of the country. It wasn't just one State or the other. Everyone that I shook hands with I asked: Is this personally affecting you? It was amazing to me that most of the people I talked to, it personally affected them. Many of them are retired. They are not spring chickens, as a lot of us are not. They were willing to weather a really long bus ride, a really hot day to stand arm in arm in brotherhood and sisterhood for something that we all believe in and on which we are approaching a critical deadline.

So as I said before, these are the workers who power our Nation and who work hard. My kids have gone to school with their grandchildren. We go to church with many of them. In a small State like ours, Senator Manchin and I certainly know many of the folks and the faces that we saw that day and the ones that are affected by this.

We can't leave them in the lurch. This is where we are. We hear the statistics--22,000. Some of the statistics are a little bit different, but they could be losing their health care here in the next three months. The pension plan that provides benefits to over 90,000 current retirees could become insolvent.

We have a fix. Senator Portman and I have talked a lot about this because we have those adjoining parts of our States that are very much affected, and we have worked hard to bring this fix and get it to the point where we think we are assured that the vote will come through the Finance Committee, on which Senator Portman serves.

So I look forward to that. Even though it disappointingly was pushed back a week, we still are fighting the fight.

The war on coal in our State has resulted in thousands of lost jobs. Six of our counties are in a deep depression. We were at a local hearing in Morgantown where our State economist said that six of our counties are in a very severe depression. A lot of these counties are where a lot of these folks live. For these counties and communities across our State, the situation, if we don't do something, is going to get even worse.

This is not a partisan issue. We have Republicans and Democrats here. I would say it is more of a regional issue than a partisan issue. We are working with Chairman Hatch to get this bill marked up in the Finance Committee, and, hopefully, that will get us the next step that we need, which is the big step and which is to get it across the floor here in the halls of the Senate.

So with the hard-working men and women of Appalachia, with the leadership that Senator Manchin has shown on this, and with many of us here working together in the many different ways that we can affect the votes of our colleagues--somebody said to me: What is going to make the difference? You are on that side of the aisle where maybe there are a lot of folks that can't see why we should vote for this. What I would implore them to do is to look at the human faces of the people who are affected here. These are people, most of whom have worked hard their whole lives. Many of them have health issues--severe health issues. Many of them are living on limited resources. This really just kind of kicks the stool out from under their entire family.

So I join with everybody here today to make that real difference that we need to make, and we will keep the fight going here as we move through the next several weeks and months.

Thank you.

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