Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Relating to ``Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards; Fuel System Integrity of Hydrogen Vehicles; Compressed Hydrogen Storage System Integrity; Incorporation By Reference''

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, there is a sort of general rule in politics, which is that if you start your meeting at 1 a.m., you are probably not proud of what you are doing. Now, there are some instances in which you start the meeting at 7 p.m. and it goes long and then you have to vote at whatever hour you finish. But to convene at 1 a.m. is an intentional thing. It is to say: I would very much like if nobody saw what we were up to. And that is exactly what happened at 1 a.m. today, Wednesday morning.

Republicans in the House know that the bill that they are considering is super unpopular, but they have been ordered to pass it anyway. That is what is happening on the other side of the Capitol right now. House Republicans have convened the Rules Committee at 1 a.m. to advance their tax bill, and it is because they know this bill stinks.

For starters, it is the largest wealth transfer in American history. Think about that. There have been a lot of wealth transfers in American history, but this is the biggest one in terms of the Tax Code. It is not like they were redistributing wealth among the wealthy. They are literally taking from the poor--people who don't have enough money--and shoveling it straight into the pockets of people who already have more than enough.

This bill is about making the richest people ever to walk the Earth even richer. How do they plan to do that? By kicking 14 million Americans off of health insurance and denying food assistance to millions more. People will be turned away at hospitals and go to bed hungry, all so that billionaires have a bit more.

You do not need fancy polling to tell you that this is super unpopular. And so Republicans have decided to fix that problem by convening the hearing in the middle of the night, hoping that people will not notice.

The plain facts of the bill are so egregious. And as I started to write these remarks, I had a problem, which is, How do you describe this thing accurately and not sound like you are frothing at the mouth like a partisan and sort of overstating the case? Because this really is kicking 14 million people off of Medicaid, kicking millions more off of food assistance, and then that is the savings that is generated in order to fund these tax cuts for billionaire corporations and the wealthiest people in the United States.

And what happens if something is both true and sounds like a partisan accusation? But that is where we are at. This is actually what they are trying to do.

Here is the thing, even the biggest cuts to Medicaid in history are still not enough to cover the cost of these enormous giveaways. So the Republicans have turned to one of their favorite punching bags: solving the climate crisis.

Never mind that hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in clean energy across the country, mostly in Republican States and districts; never mind that those investments are creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs; never mind that even if you don't care about any of that, there is a basic principle in running a smart economy and running an investable economy--and that is that when the private sector makes an investment on the basis of the Tax Code and they are in the middle of that investment, you can't pull the rug out from under them.

The reason is very simple. Besides fairness and besides the fact that we are undermining progress towards actually addressing an existential crisis for the planet, it also makes the United States very hard to invest in because if you were a business and you are looking at the Federal Tax Code and you are saying: I am going to make a 5-, maybe 10- year investment--capital investment--in chips, manufacturing, climate, agriculture, hospitality, real estate, transportation, infrastructure, whatever it may be--you are doing it on the basis of what the Federal Tax Code says.

And then your investment committee, board of directors, whomever it may be, will say: How do we know these things are going to stay on the books?

The normal answer is: Come on, the Federal Government is not going to pull out a tax incentive structure in the middle of your investment and construction cycle.

And the truth is, yes, they are.

So this doesn't have just climate implications or economic implications in terms of the specific projects. It actually has to do with how stable of an investment climate we establish in the United States of America. We are no longer doing ``all of the above.'' The argument that we used to have between the political parties was Democrats would say we have to transition to clean energy; Republicans would say, no, let's do clean energy, but let's also do these other things.

But now the Republican position is picking winners and losers and, basically, riding the losers into the ground.

Here is the very tough truth: Coal is on the way out, whether you like it or not. But Trump and Republicans would rather revive it for a few more years just to squeeze a couple more years of profitability out of it because, after all, their capital investments are fully amortized. So a couple more years of profitability means no more investment, but a couple more years of revenue.

So that is what they are doing. This is going to raise costs for Americans. Let's be clear. This is going to raise costs for Americans.

There was a time--and I was part of these debates in the State of Hawaii--there was a time when there was a tradeoff between how much consumers had to pay and our climate objectives. But those trends have changed. Now wind is the cheapest form of energy. Nuclear is among the cheapest forms of energy. Solar is among the cheapest forms of energy. For me, in the State of Hawaii, to bring in low sulfur fuel oil on a fuel tanker and then light it on fire for electron is the dumbest thing to do, even if you don't care about climate.

It is simply cheaper. It is simply cheaper for consumers and businesses and for the climate crisis and, therefore, our ability to fiscally manage the climate crisis as we see increasing disasters, both in their severity and how often they happen. And then every--what?-- year, year and a half we do $150 million emergency supplemental because there are now wildfires where there have never been wildfires, floods where there have never been floods, tornadoes where there have never been tornadoes? This is not made up. Nobody gets to deny this anymore.

So there is a reason they convened at 1 a.m., and it is not because that is prime time in Hawaii. They didn't convene at 1 a.m. because they like to see each other past midnight. They convened at 1 a.m. because they are about to pass one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation that has ever been passed out of the U.S. House of Representatives.

I just wonder why--if I am a House Member and I am being told ``We are going to make all these changes. All these things that you are voting for are going to be excised from the Senate version. Don't worry,'' well, my view would be ``If you are going to fix all that stuff, why are you making me vote on it now? Why are you making me vote on it now?''

The answer is very simple: Donald Trump showed up in the caucus and used a couple of expletives. They implied that voting no is a betrayal, that standing up for your constituents is a betrayal, and I think they are all going to fall in line.

So it is up to the U.S. Senate to fix this bill or kill this bill. That is the task in front of us.

I am hoping that cooler heads prevail. I know there are a number of Republicans who hate these Medicaid cuts. I know there are a number of Republicans who have a ton of clean energy investment in their States.

There is plenty of political room to criticize the Biden administration or say ``I am against the Green New Deal'' and still be for wind and solar and nuclear and geothermal and agriculture that is done in a more climate-friendly way. All of that is available to us. We don't have to do things in the maximally unpopular way, but the Speaker apparently wants to do it that way.
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