Executive Session

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I rise to speak in opposition to the nomination of Neomi Rao to serve as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Ms. Rao is the latest in a string of ultra-conservative judicial nominees who will rubberstamp Donald Trump's far-right agenda. Her record portends a threat to the rights of women and minorities, to consumer protection statutes and regulations, and to the security of our financial institutions.

Moreover, Ms. Rao utterly lacks the experience to serve on the court that many view as second in importance only to the U.S. Supreme Court. She practiced for only 3 years as an associate at a large law firm. None of her practice was in Federal courts or State courts, before administrative agencies, or involved criminal proceedings.

These are disqualifying reasons on their own, but I rise to speak about Ms. Rao's record on the environment, and the contempt she has demonstrated for fair, reasonable, and commonsense regulations that protect the health of our communities and the safety of our air and drinking water.

Ms. Rao currently serves in the Office of Management and Budget as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, OIRA. She is commonly known as the Trump administration's ``regulatory czar.'' This role has her in charge of implementing the Trump administration's anti-environment, climate-change-denying, and polluter-friendly agenda.

Ms. Rao has called climate change a ``dangerous orthodoxy,'' led the Trump administration's efforts to gut fundamental environmental protections, and has misused the regulatory review process for partisan political purposes.

The attacks on the environment that Ms. Rao has launched from OIRA include rolling back national auto fuel efficiency standards, challenging California's Clean Air Act waiver that allowed it to set higher fuel efficiency standards, removing safety rules for fertilizer plants, and rolling back safety rules put in place for oil rigs after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in 2010.

During review of a proposed rollback of the Methane and Waste Prevention Rule, Ms. Rao's office repeatedly pressured the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, to adopt fossil fuel industry requests to significantly reduce natural gas leak inspections. This would have doubled the amount of methane released into the atmosphere and, according to the EPA's own determination, conflicted with its legal obligation to reduce emissions.

Ms. Rao's office censored language about the impact of climate change on child health when reviewing a proposed rollback of the Refrigerant Management Program, a program that limited the release of greenhouse gases thousands of times more powerful that carbon dioxide.

Ms. Rao's office approved a proposed EPA rule to roll back public health protections that reduce pollution from wood-burning stoves, despite the EPA's own admission that the new rule would cost nine times as much in harm to public health as it would benefit the industry.

Ms. Rao has overseen the Trump administration's repeal of regulations to address climate change, including a repeal of President Obama's historic Clean Power Plan that would have significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions. By comparison, Ms. Rao has approved a proposal to replace the Clean Power Plan with a rule that would lead to increases in carbon dioxide emissions, asthma attacks, and even death from black carbon, mercury, and other dangerous air emissions from power plants.

It is bad enough that, with Donald Trump, we have a climate-change denier in the White House, and with Andrew Wheeler, we have a coal industry lobbyist running the EPA. We don't need a judge on the DC Circuit whose record demonstrates that she is a sympathetic ally to their anti-environment agenda. I urge my colleagues to vote no on the nomination of Neomi Rao to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source