Nomination of Janet Garvin McCabe

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, now on another matter, this week the Senate is set to vote on President Biden's nominee to be Deputy Administrator of the EPA. This nominee actually needs no introduction for my fellow Kentuckians and our neighbors in coal country.

But for those less familiar, Janet McCabe was the chief author of the Clean Power Plan that President Obama unveiled back in 2015. Well, 6 years and thousands of coal industry jobs later, Ms. McCabe is set to join an administration whose job-killing policies would make the Obama EPA blush.

Of course, President Biden's War on Coal predates his administration. Back in 2008, as a candidate for the Vice Presidency, he insisted there would be ``no coal plants here in America. Build them, if they're going to build them, over there,'' obviously, meaning some other country.

Sadly, this was one area where the Obama administration, unfortunately, kept its promises. It was a terrible time to be a working American whose livelihood the Democrats happened to dislike. But our new President's leftward sprint is set to make these bad old days merely the warmup act.

Remember, rejoining the Paris climate agreement was a day one priority for this administration--this unenforceable deal whose own signatories largely ignored their commitments for the past 5 years, the deal that proved unable to keep China from significantly increasing its greenhouse gas emissions and proved unnecessary for the United States to decrease our own. We decreased our own.

But despite it all, the administration is rushing back in to signal virtue on the international stage. Here at home, they are rolling out policy after policy that would cost American families quite dearly.

The President signed away thousands of jobs by canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline. The authors of the Green New Deal boast about the radical social engineering they have seeded into the administration's legislative proposals. The infrastructure plan they have rolled out would pick winners and losers in automotive manufacturing and aim to purge the electrical grid of the most reliable and affordable forms of domestic power.

Of course, despite it all, carbon emissions don't respect national boundaries, so all the unilateral sacrifices this administration is eager to impose on blue-collar families won't make a dent in global emissions if our adversaries just keep on roaring right past us.

And now the Biden climate team is hoping to add a proven veteran from the War on Coal. The President campaigned suggesting he wouldn't owe the far left anything, but he is choosing to govern like he owes them everything.

I will oppose the McCabe nomination and would urge my colleagues to do the same.

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