H.J. Res. 88

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. President, my colleagues, it is getting very late. Indeed, most of our constituents are asleep. But across the U.S. Capitol tonight, the lights remain on.

Over in the House, they burn dimly on the House floor as Republicans try to jam through a ``big, ugly bill'' that would wreak havoc on our families, our communities, and our climate to pay for more tax cuts for wealthy people, that would cut Medicaid and block help for families that will go hungry so that billionaires like Elon Musk get another tax break they simply don't need.

But that is not what I am here to talk about this evening. I am here at this hour, or this morning, because right here, right now, in the dead of night, Republicans in the Senate are hard at work on another objective, an unprecedented and previously unimaginable effort to abandon their own standards, their own precedent, their previous very public statements, the very rules of this body, to make our air less clean.

To do so is complicated. It requires a lot of parliamentary maneuvers. Why? Because to make the air dirtier requires 60 votes, and they don't have 60 votes, or it requires Republicans to break their word, to eliminate the filibuster so they can do the bidding of those who would pollute our air.

Now, I don't blame my Republican colleagues for wanting to shroud what they have set out to do tonight in secrecy. I don't blame them for trying to hide it. It was just a few short weeks ago the Republican leader assured this body that he would never do any such thing, but that was then.

But hide or not, the blame will lay squarely on my Republican colleagues for the impact of what is done here tonight because tonight is a turning point, a moment in which the majority gave up yet another guardrail, where they chose to go nuclear, to violate the filibuster, to overturn the Parliamentarian in order to gratify the wishes of Big Oil over the need of our constituents for cleaner air.

The GOP wasn't always this way. Republican administrations didn't always demonstrate such hostility to the environment. At a different moment in our history, there was a very different kind of Republican Party.

So I would like to begin tonight by reading verbatim a message from President Ronald Reagan. The date was July 14, 1984. The then-President turned on a microphone in a studio here in Washington and took to the Nation's airwaves to deliver an address. This is part of what Ronald Reagan said:

My fellow Americans:

I'd like to talk to you today about our environment. But as I mentioned earlier this week, in doing so, I might be letting you in on a little secret--as a matter of fact, one of the best-kept secrets in Washington.

More than 15 years ago, the State of California decided that we needed to take action to combat the smog that was choking the beautiful cities of my home State. Out of that concern was born the first serious program to require manufacturers to build cleaner cars and help control air pollution. The auto industry had to build two kinds of cars--one that would be for sale in the other 49 States and one that would meet the stiff antipollution standards required in California.

We had other concerns in California, such as protecting our magnificent and unique coastline. And we took the lead in that area as well. It took the rest of the Nation a few years to catch on, but in 1970 the Congress followed California's lead and enacted the Clean Air Act. Other laws to protect and clean up the Nation's lakes and rivers were passed, and America got on with the job of protecting the environment.

Part of the secret I mentioned is that I happened to have been Governor of California back when much of this was being done. Now, obviously, neither the problems in California nor those nationally have been solved, but I'm proud of having been one of the first to recognize that States and the Federal Government have a duty to protect our natural resources from the damaging effects of pollution that can accompany industrial development.

Now, if you are just tuning in, this is a speech from Ronald Reagan.

The other part of the well-kept secret--

The former President had to say-- has to do with the environmental record of our administration, which is one of achievement in parks, wilderness land, and wildlife refuges. According to studies by the Environmental Protection Agency, the quality of our air and water has continued to improve during our administration.

In many big cities, the number of days on which pollution alerts are declared has gone down. And if you live near a river, you may have noticed that the signs have been coming down that used to warn people not to fish or swim.

We came to Washington committed to respect the great bounty and beauty of God's creation. We believe very strongly--

Reagan said-- in the concept of stewardship, caring for the resources we have so they can be shared and used productively for generations to come. And we've put that philosophy to work, correcting deficiencies of past policies and advancing long- overdue initiatives.

Let me give you some facts that our critics never seem to remember. When we took office in 1980, we faced a dusty shelf of reports which pointed out our predecessors had been so busy spending money on new lands for parks that they seriously neglected basic upkeep of the magnificent parks we had. So, we temporarily put off acquiring new parkland and started a new billion-dollar, 5-year program to repair and modernize facilities at our national parks and wildlife refuges. If you've been to just about any national park lately, you've probably seen the results.

We've nearly finished repairing the damage from years of neglect, and I've asked the Congress for almost $160 million to resume buying lands to round out our national park and refuge systems. We also took the lead in developing a new approach to protecting some 700 miles of undeveloped coastal areas--the dunes, beaches, and barrier islands that are some of our most beautiful and productive natural resources.

Now--

Reagan said-- there are some who want you to believe that commitment to protecting the environment can be measured by comparing the budgets of EPA under the previous administration with those proposed and approved by the Congress under my administration. But they deliberately ignore that the major Federal environmental laws are designed to be carried out by the States in partnership with EPA.

By the time the clean air, clean water, and other big programs put in place in the early 1970's moved into their second decade, the States had largely taken over the job formerly performed by the Federal Government. With the successful delegation to the States, EPA, under the leadership of Bill Ruckelshaus, has been freed to move on to the challenges of the 1980's--such as cleaning up abandoned toxic waste dumps.

Under our administration, funding for the Superfund cleanup program will have increased from just over a hundred million dollars in 1981 to $620 million in 1985.

And by the way, under this ``big, ugly bill,'' the cuts to Superfund cleanup will be enormous. It will move the country exactly the opposite direction that Ronald Reagan moved the country back in 1981.

By the end of this year--

Reagan said-- EPA expects to have undertaken more than 400 emergency actions to remove and contain public health hazards. And because we recognize that we need to do more cleanup work than the current law provides, I'm committed to seeking an extension of the Superfund program.

As I said, our progress on protecting the environment is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington. But it's not, by far, the only secret. And I'll have more on that in the months ahead.

Until next week, thanks for listening, and God bless you.

That was Ronald Reagan. The Republican Party wasn't always like it is today. There was a time when the environment and clean water and clean air were a priority of this party.

Now, this isn't the first time I have noted on the Senate floor that Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his grave. It is certainly true of our treatment of Ukraine and our giving in to the Kremlin. But that President, who was looked to as a portrait of the American conservative movement, watching as the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan completes its transformation into the party of Donald J. Trump, it probably doesn't recognize what it sees.

What happened to ``States' rights''? Because this attack on California's clean air policy is an attack on States' rights.

What happened to ``freedom to innovate''? This will stifle innovation.

What happened to ``family values''?

How is what we are doing here tonight in service of our kids and the air that they breathe?

Now, Ronald Reagan wasn't the only Republican President to believe in clean air and clean water. This is Richard Nixon giving an address January 22, 1970.

I now turn to a subject which, next to our desire for peace, may well become the major concern of the American people in the decade of the seventies.

In the next 10 years we shall increase our wealth by 50 percent. The profound question is: Does this mean we will be 50 percent richer in a real sense, 50 percent better off, 50 percent happier?

Or does it mean that in the year 1980 the President standing in this place will look back on a decade in which 70 percent of our people lived in metropolitan areas choked by traffic, suffocated by smog, poisoned by water, deafened by noise, and terrorized by crime?

These are not the great questions that concern world leaders at summit conferences. But people do not live at the summit. They live in the foothills of everyday experience, and it is time for all of us to concern ourselves with the way real people live in real life.

The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

If you are tuning in, these are the words of Richard Nixon.

Restoring nature to its natural State--

He said-- is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later.

Clean air, clean water, open spaces--these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now--

Nixon said-- they can be.

We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

What more profound words for today than that?

Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

And that debt is called climate change. Those are my words, not Nixon's.

But Nixon went on to say:

The program I shall propose to Congress will be the most comprehensive and costly program in this field in America's history.

This was a Republican President.

It is not a program for just one year. A year's plan in this field is no plan at all. This is a time to look ahead not a year, but 5 years or 10 years--whatever time is required to do the job. I shall propose to this Congress a $10 billion nationwide clean waters program to put modern municipal waste treatment plants in every place in America where they are needed to make our waters clean again, and do it now. We have the industrial capacity, if we begin now, to build them all within 5 years. This program will get them built within 5 years.

As our cities and suburbs relentlessly expand, those priceless open spaces needed for recreation areas accessible to their people are swallowed up--often forever. Unless we preserve these spaces while they are still available, we will have none to preserve. Therefore--

Nixon said--

I shall propose new financing methods for purchasing open space and parklands now, before they are lost to us.

The automobile--

Nixon said-- is our worst polluter of the air. Adequate control requires further advances in engine design and fuel composition.

Little could he have imagined the electric vehicles of today. But he said:

We shall intensify our research, set increasingly strict standards--

This is Richard Nixon-- and strengthen enforcement procedures--and we shall do it now.

We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor's yard.

This requires comprehensive new regulations. It also requires that, to the extent possible, the price of goods should be made to include the costs of producing and disposing of them without damage to the environment.

Isn't this incredible? Richard Nixon, in the 1970s, talking about requiring that the price of goods should include the cost of producing and disposing of them without damage to the environment.

He went on:

Now, I realize that the argument is often made that there is a fundamental contradiction between economic growth and the quality of life, so that to have one we must forsake the other.

The answer--

He said-- is not to abandon growth, but to redirect it. For example, we should turn toward ending congestion and eliminating smog with the same reservoir of inventive genius that created them in the first place.

Now, Richard Nixon--that was in January of 1970.

This was Richard Nixon in July of the same year, July of 1970, in a special message to the Congress:

To the Congress of the United States: As concern with the condition of our physical environment has intensified, it has become increasingly clear that we need to know more about the total environment--land, water and air. It also has become increasingly clear that only by reorganizing our Federal efforts can we develop that knowledge, and effectively ensure the protection, development and enhancement of the total environment itself.

The Government's environmentally related activities have grown up piecemeal over the years. The time has come to organize them rationally and systematically. As a major step in this direction, I am transmitting today two reorganization plans: one to establish an Environmental Protection Agency, and one to establish, within the Department of Commerce, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This was the work of a Republican President: the EPA and NOAA. And look what is happening to it today.

The Administrator of the EPA Lee Zeldin testified before our committee today. He is calling to cut the EPA in half--cut it by more than half, actually: by 55 percent. This creation of the Nixon administration, he believes more than half of it is a waste. This Agency devoted to what Reagan talked about, what Nixon talked about, devoted to clean air and clean water, is just a waste.

This was the CEO of Ford just a year ago:

If we cannot make money on EVs, we have competitors who have the largest market in the world, who already dominate globally, already setting up their supply chain around the world. If we don't make profitable EVs in the next five years, what is the future? We will just shrink into North America.

What about our competitiveness? Are we walking away from that too? Every step this body takes this week to undermine the growth of what could be America's next great manufacturing powerhouse will be felt not just by the big three but in communities all across America.

A recent study from Princeton University found that if Congress takes action to target these emissions regulations, as they are doing, and the EV tax credits that we passed in the last administration--can you guess the place that will be the most impacted? It will be the same States that supported Donald Trump in the last election. That is because the EV component plants that are being built for this burgeoning sector are happening in Texas and in Tennessee and in Missouri and in South Carolina. The battery factories are being launched in Indiana, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan.

Every signal we send to American industry and to the world that we are throwing in the towel to Chinese EV manufacturers will resonate far longer than I think this Senate realizes this week, and it will hit American families in the exact place it will hurt the most. It will hit them in the wallet. Cutting tax credits, shuttering American electric car manufacturers--these will make the modern commute, the future of family vacation, all that, more expensive as we become all that more reliant on fossil fuels to go anywhere.

It will also hurt the future earnings of our apprentices, our tradespeople, our engineers by killing in the cradle a sector of the American economy to the tune of thousands of good-paying jobs.

That is not to mention, even more significantly, making Americans spend far more on healthcare as they face more sick days and worse health conditions from dirtier air.

Now, I want to talk about that for a moment because I know there are many who take for granted our air, just as we take for granted that the sun will rise or set. While air that we breathe may feel like a given, we cannot lose sight of the fact, for 135 million people--more than 4 in every 10 Americans--they live in a community impacted by unhealthy levels of air pollution; and 24 million Americans--or 1 in every 14 adults--are living with asthma. That rate is even higher in children, with about 1 in every 12 kids living with asthma.

Now, consider for a second that elevated air pollution has been found by the University of Washington, Columbia, and the University of Buffalo to be equivalent on your lungs like a pack of cigarettes.

Why is smog like a pack of cigarettes? Because it has the same effects exactly on our health. Here is what the EPA says on this topic:

[C]onstant exposure to elevated particle pollution will contribute to reduced respiratory function, even in apparently healthy people.

Here is another quote:

Respiratory effects related to active exposure to fine particles include . . . reduction in pulmonary function, increased airway inflammation . . . and can be serious enough to result in emergency department visits and hospital admissions.

That is heart trouble, that is lung trouble, health effects so devastating you could land in the hospital just from constant exposure to smog--smog--something we will see a lot more of once again by repealing these Clean Air Act standards that California has set.

Now, I heard one of my colleagues earlier today say that California was imposing its standards on everybody else. Now, that is just not the case. For decades now, California has had a right to set its own air quality standards. That right was given by statute.

But other States have chosen to follow California's lead. They weren't required to. They weren't forced to. They chose to. They chose for their constituents to have air as clean as what California was striving to achieve.

And, yes, a lot of States adopted those standards, and some of the other States might not like it. Maybe they are just fine with having dirtier air, and that is their judgment.

But to tell California we can't set our own air standard, to tell California that because other States are following our example, we should lose the opportunity to decide how clean or how dirty we want our own air to be; is that a road we really want to go down?

Now, I know because I have been in the majority before, and when you are in the majority, you feel like you will never be in the minority, but the tables will turn. Do my colleagues want a situation where the Democratic majority can look at rules we don't like in red States and say with a simple vote--majority vote--we are going to get rid of them? we don't like your rule on mifepristone? we don't like your license for natural gas? we don't like something your State likes, and therefore we are going to legislate by CRA? Because that is what is going to happen. You can overturn the Parliamentarian here. We can overturn the Parliamentarian there. I just don't think that is a road we want to go down.

I grew up in California. I have lived there since I was 11 years old. I saw the smog days, and I knew the haze that had come to define our cities and skies for a generation dating back to the first automobile boom of the post-war era. I remember all the smog alerts, days you were warned not to go outside.

It is no surprise that that smog at the time became synonymous with California. Even today, we see some of the most densely populated and at-risk areas in the Nation for air pollution are still in California.

The Los Angeles County area, including the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys; the Central Valley, including Bakersfield and Fresno; San Diego County; San Francisco Bay Area--these are all areas that see dense populations facing increasing health risks from smog, which is why California took such a step 60 years ago to become the first State to tackle air pollution caused by automobiles head-on, to take drastic generational action to clean up our air.

But the steps that my colleagues in the Republican Party are taking tonight aren't going to make America healthy again. They are going to make America hazy again. If we go down this road, the future is clear even if our skies won't be.

Americans will pay for this nuclear option with more of their paychecks on hospital bills. They will pay for it with fewer jobs, less success in their communities, fewer years with their loved ones, more cancers, less time to enjoy the quality of life, and less quality of life.

That is not a future I want to see. I want to see a future envisioned, I think, as we heard by Democratic Presidents and Republicans Presidents alike, in which we invest in the technologies that can clean our air and clean our water, in which we get ahead of this tipping point on climate change, in which fire seasons go back to being a few months a year and not year-round, in which we are not constantly seeing our wildlife at risk, and in which we have to wonder what the future will look like for our kids and our grandkids.

It may seem like a small step tonight to get rid of the filibuster, to force California to abandon its standards for its own air, but this step down this road may be the first. It will not be the last. And I want better for my kids and grandkids, and I want better for everyone else's family as well.

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