Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SULLIVAN. Madam President, I just want to thank my colleagues for the vote that just occurred here on the floor of the Senate. It was a bipartisan victory, 50 to 47, on the Congressional Review Act that I had put forward with all of my Republican colleagues to rescind the onerous, job-killing Biden administration rule that came out in April that would make it harder to build things in America. It would make it harder to employ people, especially our incredibly productive American workers.

So that just passed. That was a repudiation of the Biden White House in a bipartisan vote on the Senate floor.

Here is the thing. Even my Senate colleagues--because I was working the vote pretty hard down there in the well--even my Senate colleagues who voted against it, several of them came up to me and said: You know what. You are right. We have really got to fix NEPA. It is killing the country. It is killing our ability to do anything. So that was an important vote, but a good conversation is starting here.

We have the best workers in the world. If we let them build, we can do great things again in terms of building this country and not let redtape, far-left environmental groups, regulations, and endless litigation stop us.

So I also want to thank all the groups that supported this resolution.

I had a bigger sign down on the Senate floor when I was giving an earlier speech, but the groups that were supporting this legislation are very diverse. There are over 50 groups of men and women who produce things, grow things, and build the country. I want to thank them for the great support of this Congressional Review Act that just passed.

I really want to give a shout-out to the building trades, the laborers, the operating engineers, and the trade unions that are doing such a great job building this country who want to work. They know these regulations are killing workers' ability to get good jobs.

We have a long way to go to fix the broken system of permitting in America and the endless litigation by environmental lawyers who want to stop everything, but today was an important start and an important vote on the floor of the Senate, showing America that a bipartisan group of Senators will stand up to these far-left groups and say: Hey, you know what? We gotta build. We need to build. And that was the message here.

We are going to try to move this in the House and get it on President Biden's desk. He says he is blue-collar Joe. Well, let's see if he is blue-collar Joe when this comes to his desk and he would veto or not veto something that all the building trades in America support.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source