Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the United States Fish and Wildlife Service Relating to ``Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Lesser Prairie-Chicken; Threatened Status with Section 4(D) Rule for the Northern Distinct Population Segment and Endangered Status for the Southern Distinct Population Segment''

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I am so delighted that the Presiding Officer is in the Chair--the Senator from Nevada--who has led this fight on the floor against this incredibly counterproductive measure that the Senator from Florida has brought here--incredibly, in the name, somehow, of being tough on China.

I have seen lots of things on this floor that didn't make sense. I have seen lots of things where I have wondered about the judgment of people who were pursuing something allegedly in the interests of the American people, allegedly in the interests of American jobs, allegedly in the interests of manufacturing, allegedly because we are competing with China.

I have never seen something as counterproductive as this, and I want to thank the Presiding Officer for her leadership because she comes from Nevada and I come from Colorado, and we know the jobs that are at stake here--tens of thousands of jobs that could go away--a billion dollars of tariffs, of taxes that our solar industry would have to pay as they are going out of business because of what the Senator from Florida is trying to do in the name of being tough on the Chinese.

So let's talk about that for a second. Let's think about who is actually being tough on the Chinese. One of the benefits of the way the Chinese are organized--well, they see it as a benefit; I don't see it as a benefit, but they do--is that they don't live in a democracy; they live in a totalitarian society. In that totalitarian society, they can make 5-year plans; they can make 10-year plans. Xi can say: This is what we are going to do for the next 5 years. This is what we are going to do for the next 10 years.

And I would argue that, for the 20 years that we were spending fighting those two wars in the Middle East that we probably shouldn't have been fighting for those 20 years, the Chinese were marching along and marching along and marching along, stealing our intellectual property and developing new industries and new technologies. We had our eye off the ball.

One of the things that is hard about democracy is that sometimes we can't really plan much longer than between two elections--or one election, if we are really being pathetic. But, recently, there has been a different approach here. Recently, there has been a different approach in the infrastructure bill that we passed a couple of years ago that was bipartisan. It was the first infrastructure bill of any significance since Eisenhower was our President.

We finally said: Do you know what? We need to start investing in our country again.

And all over Nevada, all over Colorado, Americans are working on our roads and bridges--long overdue--as a result of bipartisan work, Republicans and Democrats working together.

There was another bill that we passed that was the semiconductor legislation, the so-called CHIPS Act. Some people remember--I certainly do--when I was in college, Ronald Reagan was the President of the United States. And back then, Madam President, for some reason, everybody thought that it was a good idea to ship everything to Southeast Asia to get it made there, that it would be a good idea to ship it to China and have it made there. That is kind of what Ronald Reagan's view of the world was.

And I regret the fact that we went down that road for decades. Now that CHIPS bill--that semiconductor bill--that is the first piece of legislation since Ronald Reagan was President that said: Stop it. We are going to bring an industry back to the United States. We are going to bring the semiconductor industry back here.

And, by the way, I hope that is not the last. I hope that is only the first. But it sure made sense to start with semiconductors because 90 percent of the most important semiconductors in our fighter jets are made in Taiwan, 110 miles off the coast of China. Ninety percent of the semiconductors in our surface ships and in our submarines are made in Taiwan, 110 miles off the coast of China. What could possibly go wrong? Yet Democrats and Republicans working together said: We are going to bring that back.

Well, we had another bill, Madam President, that I regret didn't get any Republican votes. I wish that it had. I really do wish that it had because that bill had two pieces. One was healthcare, and one was energy.

In the healthcare piece, we cut drug prices for seniors. We said we are going to cap them at $2,000. We said Medicare is going to negotiate drug prices on behalf of the American people for the first time. We capped insulin at 35 bucks a month--pretty amazing. And I am sorry some people didn't vote for that, and I don't know exactly why.

But the other part was an energy part, and, here, we were saying: We are going to compete with China. And here we were saying: We are going to lead the world in the transition that we are going to make from the fossil fuel economy that we have today to a clean energy economy; and that no country in the world is better situated to do that than the United States.

Does that mean we can turn fossil fuels off tomorrow? No. Can we turn them off yesterday? No.

I, for one, believe it is going to be really important for this country to export LNG, or liquefied natural gas, over to Europe to help keep Europe in the fight against Putin and to help replace Chinese coal. I think that is going to help us with emissions. Not everybody agrees with me on that. I believe strongly.

And I don't think there is a country in the world that is better situated--because of our abundant fossil fuels that we have today, because of our commitment to the rule of law, because of our commitment to innovation, because we are not as corrupt as a lot of the countries that we are dealing with, and because we have passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which had $270 billion of tax credits in it to drive innovation in the American economy. Because of all those things taken together, I am so happy to live in this country because we can lead that transition, and we can compete with China. We can outcompete China.

But into this sunny picture came the Biden administration, an administration that I generally support. But they, a few months ago, decided that they were going to begin an investigation into where certain solar panels came from. And the Presiding Officer and I and some others said: Hold on a second. We haven't made the transition yet. We haven't done it yet. It is going to take us 2 to 3 years to set up these manufacturing plants to build solar panels here, to make them here so we can compete with China. And, in the meantime, we have got tens of thousands of people who are swinging hammers in Nevada and Colorado and all across this country, who are climbing ladders and getting up on roofs to install solar panels to make sure that we are driving away from our reliance on fossil fuels and into a world where we are relying on wind and the Sun.

And the minute that the Biden administration did this, companies in Colorado started to say: We are going to go out of business. Companies in Nevada and New Mexico said: We are going out of business. The capital that was investing in them went away.

This isn't hypothetical. This was happening. They were saying to me and I know they were saying to the Presiding Officer: We are going to go bankrupt as a result of this policy.

We are going bankrupt as a result of this policy. We can't sell enough solar panels here in America. We can't install enough solar panels. We can't hire enough people. And now our own country is saying we are going to bring this to an end.

We went to the White House, and we said: We can't do this to tens of thousands of people all across our country. We can't do this if you are committed to fighting climate change. We can't do this if you are committed to the union workers who are installing all of those panels all over the United States.

I remember a phone call with the Presiding Officer, with the White House, where I said: This is a matter of days, not months.

To their credit, they came back, and they said: You guys were right. We need to put a moratorium in place. We need to have 2 years where we can have a transition to, you know, give us the chance to start manufacturing these panels here in America.

It is amazing to have people that strategic in our democracy, to be able to say: You know what, we passed a law--the Inflation Reduction Act--that is going to put us in the position of being able to manufacture these solar panels here, which Ronald Reagan and all those people should never have sent to China to begin with. So we are going to bring them back, but it is going to take us a little time.

In the meantime, we are going to adopt a set of policies that are going to allow the small businesses that are installing solar all over Nevada, all over Colorado, all over this country--we are going to not just allow them, we are going to celebrate the fact that they are there, and we are going the support them and give them notice.

We are going to act strategically with respect to our competition with China. And that is what we did. The combination of that moratorium and the Inflation Reduction Act--that is probably the most strategic we have been around here in decades--in decades. And now comes the Senator from Florida, who says: I am going to blow this up. I am going to compete with China by destroying the solar industry in the United States. I am going to compete with China by putting tens of thousands of people who are now working on the unemployment roll. I am going to compete with China, the Senator of Florida says, by putting a $1 billion retroactive tax on the solar industry in Nevada, in Colorado, and all across the United States of America.

That doesn't sound like competing to China. That sounds like surrender, to me. That sounds like waving the white flag, to me.

In all the history of self-inflicted wounds around here, that is just the latest example. And don't get me started on that, although I will just say parenthetically, why anybody in this Chamber or in that Chamber would think this is the moment in American history to raise interest rates on the American people, on home buyers, and on people who have car loans and people who are paying student debt, I don't know. But that is not the topic we are here for today. But it is almost nuts, especially when the status quo is going to be so great for America because the status quo is, we are going to spend the next 2 years continuing to install solar panels. We are going to spend the next 2 years standing up manufacturing all across the United States of America. I hope a bunch of that is going to be in Colorado so we are building and manufacturing these solar panels here.

So what I would say is, if you are voting with the Senator from Florida, don't do it because you are competing somehow with the Chinese. You are surrendering to the Chinese. If you are doing it because you think that we got taken to the cleaners by the Chinese in terms of the manufacturing of solar panels to begin with, I acknowledge that, but that wasn't the Biden administration's fault. They are the ones who are trying to bring it back. They are the ones who are bringing it back, just like we were the ones who brought the semiconductor industry back.

We have an incredible opportunity to go forward here, to grow the industry that we have, and to lead the world, as I said, in this transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.

There is no country in the world that is better situated than the United States of America to lead that transition because of who we are, because of the natural resources we have, and because of the bill the Presiding Officer and I voted for. We shouldn't upset that. We shouldn't change that.

So I would encourage every single Senator in this Chamber, whether Democrat or Republican, to vote down this bill in the name of the competition we are in with China; to vote down this bill in the name of working people in this country; to vote down this bill in the name of our kids and grandkids, who hopefully are going to benefit from our leadership and the strategy we have been pursuing to make this transition. Let's agree together that we can find much more constructive ways to compete with our adversaries around the world.

Thank you, Madam President. Thank you for your leadership on this issue, and thank you for giving me a few minutes to talk today.

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