Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Environmental Protection Agency Relating to ``Emissions Budget and Allowance Allocations for Indiana Under the Revised Cross-State Air Pollution
Floor Speech
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Mrs. CAPITO. Five minutes.
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Mrs. CAPITO. Madam President, I would like to thank the gentleman from Indiana for really framing the debate for his home State of Indiana.
I rise today in opposition as well to S.J. Res. 60, a CRA that is introduced by my colleague from Rhode Island Senator Whitehouse to overturn this technical correction to the State of Indiana's emissions. The interim technical correction is necessary due to the Supreme Court's stay of the good neighbor rule.
I urge my colleagues to vote no and return the Senate floor to our business of confirming President Trump's nominees in the face of historic obstruction.
Allow me to explain just a little bit--and both of them have explained this. In 2021, the EPA issued a Federal implementation plan covering Indiana. In doing so, they relied on the announced retirement of four electric-generating units projected to happen in 2023. In 2022, those powerplants announced they would no longer close, which EPA counted for in their good neighbor rule, so the Supreme Court subsequently stayed that rule, meaning that Indiana was forced into their now-outdated 2021 emissions budget.
The Trump administration's EPA finalized this interim rule that this CRA would repeal to adjust Indiana's emissions budget to reflect what it would have looked like in 2021 had those plants not announced retirement.
I will say that every single day, every one of our offices is deluged with people coming in, saying: We need more power in this country. If we are going to win the race in AI, if we are going to win the next race in innovation, we have to have more power.
So this is an example, I think, of the Trump EPA working to make changes that ensure legal durability and reflect practical energy and environmental needs for specific States that the Biden administration had neglected.
It is surprising to me that anybody would want to spend time on this minor interim rule specific to one State that will not have a material impact on air quality or attainment of the 2008 ozone standard, which is the purpose of the rule. However, as we have seen time and time again, they are relentless in their efforts to weaponize our environmental statutes to shut down powerplants and manufacturing that provide good-paying jobs in States like Indiana and in the rest of the Rust Belt. This straightforward action only received five comments-- five. I have got them right here. Yes, a majority of the comments that the EPA received were in support of this rule, and the two others were anonymous comments.
Where was the outrage against this rule and then when the EPA was accepting comments?
Just to frame how many comments you got, when I did my Congressional Review Act of the Obama clean powerplant, I got 4.3 million comments; with the Biden clean powerplant 2.0, 1.3 million comments; with the Biden WOTUS rule, 115,000; with the California waiver, 53,000.
This is all the people in this country who care about what we are doing right now. It is just attempting to waste floor time in the U.S. Senate, trying to reverse a technical correction in an underhanded effort to close powerplants that provide affordable electricity and jobs for American workers and help us progress in this race for superiority in the race to AI. We need more energy, not less; and the CRA is a deliberate attempt to shut down powerplants in Indiana that are not popular. They are coal-fired power plants--love it--when grid reliability experts are warning of a shortage of baseline power.
I am fully against this CRA, and I hope that my colleagues will join me in that.
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