3% Withholding Repeal and Job Creation Act--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. This last Sunday I was watching an ABC morning news show, and Christiane Amanpour was interviewing the Speaker of the House, John Boehner of Ohio. Speaker Boehner was asked a number of questions. The one he clearly wanted to focus on is what he called the Republican jobs program. He handed to Ms. Amanpour a laminated card which he said was the Republican jobs program that had passed the House of Representatives and was dying in the Senate. It has never been called for passage. It struck me as odd because I missed that during the course of this last year that there was a Republican jobs program, and I was a little bit worried because we are looking for every opportunity we can to create jobs.

So I came back and said to my staff, can you get a copy of this laminated card? I want to see what is written on it. They produced the card for me, and I took a look at it. As a result, I would have to say the Republican view on how to create jobs and move the economy forward is considerably different than my own and considerably different than the views of most Americans. What Republicans have proposed doing is eliminating rules and regulations. They believe that is what is holding back the growth of the American economy. One of the areas they particularly focused on is known as the Dodd-Frank bill, the Wall Street reform bill.

Some of us are not suffering from political amnesia. We can recall what happened just a few years ago all across America when at the end of the Bush administration we faced some of the worst choices I have ever heard when we were presented an opportunity by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Paulson, to literally bail out the Wall Street banks and major institutions to the tune of almost $800 billion from the mistakes they had made.

So we were given an ultimatum: If we didn't do it, we could see a collapse of our American economy and the global economy. Reluctantly, many of us voted for that, believing that we had no choice. What we did was to send billions of dollars to banks on Wall Street that had made serious mistakes, creating credit default swaps and derivatives, creating offices in London that could skirt the American laws and, literally, hanging the American economy out to dry. The net result of that, of course, is that people suffered all across America. Individuals lost their savings and their retirements. Families were facing hardship when they were laid off and faced unemployment. Businesses closed and restructured and downsized. The whole economy suffered because of what was clearly wrongdoing on the part of our financial communities. As a result of that, President Obama said, We need to change the rules and laws in America so there will be adequate oversight so that we never get in this mess again.

The first amendment on the Dodd-Frank bill in the Senate was offered by Senator Boxer of California, which said this is the end of too big to fail. We are never walking down this path again. So we put the financial institutions and corporations of America on notice that we were not going to bail them out in the future, should they make another colossal mistake, at the expense of workers and families and businesses across America.

Then we went through the entire regulatory law as it related to Wall Street, including the stock exchanges and all of the exchanges across America, and said, What do we need to do to make certain there is transparency, to make certain the banks that were overleveraged and loaning far more than they should are in a position where they are fiscally sound, financially sound, and how do we put cops on the beat on Wall Street through the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to guard against this ever occurring again? We offered that as Wall Street reform, with the support of President Obama, but with the support of only three Republican Senators: Senators Brown, Snowe, and Collins. The majority of Republican Senators and Congressmen would not support us in this effort. We passed it anyway. The President signed it. It is now being implemented, moving forward and, I think, long overdue.

It turns out that is one of the first things the Republicans now want to eliminate in their effort to build the American economy. I can tell my colleagues we would be building the American economy on a foundation of sand if we did that. If we ignored the experience we had a few years ago when we were forced into this bailout situation, sending billions to the biggest bankers in America, and having them turn around and declare bonuses for their top officers and employees--if we ignore that reality and that history and say we were going to follow the Republican lead and eliminate this oversight of Wall Street, it would invite another economic disaster. Yet, that is one of the House Republican plans for rebuilding the American economy.

The financial crisis of 2008 wiped out 8 million jobs in America. Twenty-four million Americans today are still suffering--unemployed or underemployed. Millions of families have lost their homes. A report in the Chicago newspapers this morning was stunning and troubling. Almost 50 percent of the homes in our region in Chicago are under water. What it means is families have borrowed more in their mortgages than their home is currently valued. That is a troubling development, but it is a reality. It reflects what happened when the overanxious and overinflated real estate market got out of hand. We don't want that to happen again. If we are going to avoid it, we have to have appropriate oversight and regulation.

Many families have seen their home values plummet, not just in Chicago but nationwide. Their retirement savings have been cut in half over the last 4 years. In Illinois and across America, solid, well-run companies, many in business for decades, have been shaken to the core for the lack of credit and the lack of customers.

So what do our Republican colleagues offer as a solution? What is the Republican jobs plan? Incredibly, they have responded to America's economic crisis not by rethinking their deregulation dogma, but by doubling down. Let me explain.

In addition to repealing Wall Street reform, Republicans are trying to change the most basic protections we have in America for clean air and pure drinking water. Think about this: The Republican majority in the House has voted 168 times this year--168 times--to undercut clean air and clean water laws and to block efforts to limit global warming, protect public health, protect the public lands we have been left by previous generations, and guard against things such as future oilspills. They voted 168 times just this year, and they are not finished.

Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have attached more than 50 anti-environmental policy riders so far to spending bills for next year. They are unrelenting. I won't go into all of the environmental and public health protections the Republicans are trying to block. Let me focus on two. Republicans have used the Senate's expedited procedures to place bills blocking these two new rules directly on the Senate calendar rather than going through the regular order.

It is their right to do that. They are saying, in effect, we don't have time for the normal rules. We don't have time to hear from scientists or the American people. We need to bury these rules right now.

The first rule they want to delay is the boiler MACT rule. It is an acronym that stands for maximum achievable controlled technology. The boiler MACT rule would reduce the amount of mercury, dioxins, acid gases, and other toxic pollutants that can be emitted by large industrial boilers and solid waste incinerators. Is that the key to building jobs in America, large industrial boilers spewing more toxic chemicals into the air, solid waste incinerators burning without the regulations to protect the people who happen to live downwind? These chemicals can cause cancer, heart, lung, and kidney disease, damage to eyes and skin, impair brain development in children and babies, and learning ability, and they can kill people. That is a fact.

The other new clean air rule in the crosshairs from the Republicans is the so-called cross-State air pollution rule.

It would require significant reductions in two toxic chemicals--sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide--released by electric powerplants. These chemicals not only cause sickness and death, they can spread hundreds of miles downwind and across State lines.

Many States can't develop new jobs and industries because they have reached their air pollution limits under national clean air standards, not because of what they are doing in their States, but rather for the wind that is blowing from other States with pollution. It puts them over the limit for emissions that travel from old coal-burning powerplants in other States. That is not right, and it is not fair.

The cross-State air pollution rule would set new limits on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions and establish an emissions cap-and-trade system for 31 Eastern States and the District of Columbia. It is a reasonable, market-based solution to a serious public health threat. The Republicans would abolish it.

Both the boiler MACT rule and the cross-State air pollution rule replace rules that were developed by the EPA as far back as the Bush administration--rules that were stricken by the DC Circuit Court. In both cases, the court ordered the EPA to come up with a new rule. House Republicans have already passed a bill to delay these new air pollution quality standards for at least 15 months, and here in the Senate, they would delay them for up to 5 years. As for the cross-State air pollution rule, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has introduced a resolution of disapproval to kill it altogether so there will be no standard, so if a person happens to live downwind from a polluting powerplant and that person's State is trying to do its best to clean up its act, it is to no avail. The air pollution quality will be so bad in that State because of the neighboring State that people will face serious problems and restrictions in their own development.

The House has taken an even more radical approach. They voted almost entirely along party lines, passing a Republican bill called the TRAIN Act, that would delay indefinitely the cross-State air pollution rule, and another lifesaving rule, the mercury and air toxics standard. The TRAIN Act would also overturn the legal requirement that EPA's public health rules be based on the best advice of scientists, not the demands of politicians or their donors. It is the most serious attack on the Clean Air Act since the law was passed 40 years ago under Republican President Richard M. Nixon.

President Obama has already said he is going to veto any bills that would delay the new clean air rules. Our Republican colleagues know they don't have the votes to override his veto, so once again they are forcing the Senate to debate measures they know have no chance--zero chance--of becoming law.

And that is the Republican jobs plan.

Republicans say Federal agencies should analyze the cost of business of every new regulation, whether it is meant to protect against Wall Street recklessness, offshore oil disasters, lead-based toys, or killer cantaloupes. If a regulation hurts the corporate bottom line, the Republicans argue it shouldn't be passed.

I have a counterproposal for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Any politician who proposes deregulating an industry ought to be required to tell the public how much money deregulation would cost, how many jobs might be lost, how many lives may be cut short, how many children and other members of our families may end up in the hospital, and how much of our Nation's natural treasures may be scarred or destroyed. Let's have an honest assessment on both sides of the ledger.

When I travel across my State, much like in the Presiding Officer's State, we have big cities and small towns. I go to schools and talk to kids, and usually they have the common questions--do you have a limousine, how much money do you make--things that kids ask. So I ask questions back to them. One question I have started asking in every school is the following: How many of you know someone who is suffering from asthma? Without fail, more than half the hands will go up. In Mount Sterling, IL, a small farm town down in Brown County in downstate Illinois, half the hands went up. I guarantee that in every classroom in the city of Chicago, more than half of the hands will go up. Asthma has become an epidemic in America and is related to many things, including the quality of the air we breathe. On the South Side of Chicago, it is hard to find a child who doesn't suffer from asthma.

In 2007, the cost of asthma-related hospitalizations in Illinois totaled $280 million. The average stay costs $15,000 for an asthma case, and nearly 60 percent of those hospital costs were paid for by taxpayers through Medicaid and Medicare. Air pollution makes asthma worse. If we reduce air pollution we can reduce asthma attacks, asthma-related deaths, and save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year just for the cost of treating that single disease. That is something we never hear when the disciples of deregulation start preaching.

Here are some other facts we won't hear about deregulation from the deregulation devotees. The new boiler MACT rule will create jobs, not eliminate them. It would prevent between 2,500 and 6,500 premature deaths each year, and it would save between $22 billion and $54 billion a year in health care costs.

The cross-State air pollution rule, which they would also abolish, would also net thousands of new jobs, prevent 400,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 34,000 premature deaths each year, and save $280 billion in health care costs. In my State alone, the cross-State rule will save 1,500 lives a year and provide enough public health benefits to save our State $12 billion. Twelve billion dollars in Illinois--that is more than Illinois spent on health, hospitals, and highways combined in the year 2009.

Deregulation is a costly gamble even for businesses that are deregulated. During the last administration, oil companies were allowed to self-regulate under the Bush administration. How did that work in the Gulf of Mexico with British Petroleum? The gulf oilspill is the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history. Congratulations, self-regulators.

Local businesses suffered $4 billion to $12 billion in lost income because of self-regulation by a major oil company. BP alone is likely to spend $40 billion in claims, fines, and other expenses from this historic, awful spill.

Those who push for deregulation tell us environmental rules are job killers and nothing but a burden on businesses and consumers. They are wrong. Regulations that are well designed are, to borrow a phrase from our Republican friends, job creators. They can spur innovation and create new products, new jobs, even whole new industries. A study published by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst estimates that new air pollution rules for electric powerplants ``will provide long-term economic benefits across much of the United States in the form of highly skilled, well-paid jobs through infrastructure investment.''

Specifically, researchers found that clean air investments could create 1.5 million new jobs in 2015 right here at home. Let me bring this story closer to home. Recently I made a trip in Illinois to a new coal-fired plant. It is a plant that is amazing. It is called the Prairie State Energy Campus and it is owned by a number of electric cooperatives.

It has a $1 billion investment in the clean use of coal to produce electricity. They took a look at the law, and instead of hiring lawyers to fight it, they hired engineers to comply with it.

The plant is up and running. It is a marvel to behold. Right across from this plant is a coal mine, and the coal that is drawn from that mine goes into this plant and meets all the specifications required today by the EPA. The people who are running this plant are not whining and crying and begging for relief. They rolled up their sleeves and built a plant much cleaner than anything that existed in the United States, and they are proving it can be profitable.

I wish my Republican friends would come to the Prairie State Energy Campus. They should see and know that 4,000 union jobs were created for the construction of this plant, and they expect to have 500 permanent local jobs to boost the Illinois economy by $785 million a year with our own local coal.

The campus includes two generators that will produce 1,600 megawatts of clean, low-cost energy for more than 2.5 million customers in the Midwest. It is going to go online by the end of this year.

By using the latest technology, the plant's carbon dioxide emissions will be 15 percent lower than what is typically discharged from U.S. coal-fired powerplants.

In addition, the plant is going to save an estimated 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year by using coal from an adjacent mine instead of mining it in some other place and shipping it to the site of the power generation.

One hundred-sixty coal miners are working in the adjacent mine. I went there. It was not my first visit to a coal mine, but it is always an eye-opener to go in and see how they mine coal today. Two weeks ago, Prairie State announced plans to hire even more miners.

In Illinois, incidentally, coal miners make a pretty decent wage, $65,000 a year. So these are good jobs, right here in America, mining coal to be used in a clean coal plant. It can be done. The Republicans ought to acknowledge it can be done, and new jobs are being created in the process, while we are reducing air pollution.

In a recent survey, two out of three Americans say they support new clean air rules and oppose what the Republicans are trying to do in the name of job creation. Nearly 90 percent of all Americans--nearly 60 percent of Republicans and conservatives, I might add--said Congress should not prevent the EPA from enforcing the new rules. I wish my Republican friends, who are so dead set on eliminating these standards for air and water pollution, would listen to the people across America who want cleaner air and purer drinking water and are willing to see reasonable regulations to reach those goals.

The push to kill the new clean air rules is not coming from the American people. It is part of a huge power grab. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republicans in Congress have launched an unprecedented antiregulation campaign. The Chamber is reportedly spending millions of dollars to push the message that regulations are job killers. Their goal is to roll back existing environmental, health, financial, and other regulatory protections and to block any new protections. They are using the American jobs crisis to try to push through an agenda that will increase our deficit, actually take away jobs in America, and cause thousands of Americans to get sick and some to die.

Just cut taxes on millionaires and billionaires and get rid of government regulation and, they believe, we can get the economy humming again. That is their credo. If that were true, the last administration would have been the most prosperous in our history because that is the message and philosophy and agenda that guided the Bush administration. Instead, in the words of the Wall Street Journal--not exactly a Democratic publication--George Bush's administration produced ``the worst jobs record on record.''

We have tried this. It does not work. We have seen this movie. We know how it ends. This notion of protecting millionaires from any taxes and repealing any laws related to the regulation of our economy did not work under the Bush administration and should not be tried again.

The reason 2 million Americans are out of work has nothing to do with excessive financial or environmental regulation. If anything, our economy is hurting because we do not have the appropriate regulation in place now to avoid the excesses of the past.

To say we cannot create jobs without allowing dangerous levels of toxic chemicals into our air and water is an absolutely false choice. We have to find an approach that protects the health of American families and balances the needs of business and is based on the reality of science.

For 40 years, Democrats and Republicans used to work together on this agenda. We need to do it again. In the meantime, if our Republican colleagues want to create good middle-class jobs here at home, let's pass the President's American Jobs Act. This will not only create jobs, it will fund infrastructure and road repairs. It will cut payroll taxes for working families, saving the average family about $1,500 a year, and extend badly needed unemployment benefits for those out of work. It will keep hundreds of thousands of teachers in the classroom and cops and firefighters on the job in our neighborhoods and communities.

That is the way to create good jobs. America does not need dirty water and dirty air to create good-paying jobs. I hope the Republican agenda, even if it is laminated on a card passed out by Speaker John Boehner, will realize we can do better in this country by not compromising our public health and the great Nation in which we live.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source