[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 172 (Wednesday, October 25, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6810-S6812]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                    Environmental Protection Agency

  Mr. President, I have another issue I wish to visit. A lot of people 
are critical of what is happening right now in the Environmental 
Protection Agency. I feel I have to talk about this because, first of 
all, I was chairman of the committee that had jurisdiction over the 
Environmental Protection Agency for about 8 years. I see the things 
that are happening now, improvements that are being made.
  One is by a guy named Scott Pruitt. Scott Pruitt happens to be from 
Oklahoma. He is doing things now, and I don't know of anyone who has 
ever been abused during a confirmation process like he was. Poor Scott 
sat there. As a general rule, after a committee gets through with that 
process, they have questions for the record. Normally, they are 
somewhere between 15 and 20 questions for the record. Do you know how 
many questions Scott Pruitt got? He got 675 questions for the record. 
Anyway, he sustained that. He is now doing great things.
  Over the last 8 years, I have had little, if any, chance to praise 
the work of the EPA, but I can do it now. After 8 years of being 
relentlessly targeted by the Obama administration to shut out our 
farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, and energy industries, we have an 
administration that will listen to them and work with them. This is 
what jobs are all about.
  There is a lot of talk about the visit that was made to our 
conference by President Trump yesterday. What he talked about most of 
the time was jobs. We are in the position to correct it.
  What have we done to do that? A lot of the overregulations have been 
eliminated. There is the caricature of businesses referred to as 
greedy, loony boogeymen. But in reality, businesses are run by people 
who want what is best for America, for their families, and for the 
stockholders.
  Now, like any sector of society, you are going to find a few bad 
actors, but we have laws and remedies in place to make sure we go after 
those individuals. The last administration treated those they regulated 
as the enemy, not as partners in ensuring that the environment was 
taken care of, which led to very harmful, unworkable regulations.
  All of that is changing right now with President Trump and his 
administration. The administration realizes that working with those 
they regulate will produce better outcomes than only listening to those 
who wish to drive the industry into the ground. Administrator Pruitt 
has been meeting with farmers, ranchers, energy producers, and other 
industries to listen to and learn about how regulations affect them and 
how a worthwhile regulation might be implemented in a way that is 
producing an unintended harm.
  I really cannot see why this is a bad thing, as the goal of the EPA 
is not to put companies or farmers out of business; it is to put 
forward policies that protect the environment and do not have a heavy 
cost, but just meeting with those who have been shut out of

[[Page S6811]]

the process in the past has extremists on the left seeing red. I guess 
they are just upset that they have lost their monopoly and their 
ability to write rules for the EPA.
  Pruitt and the EPA are also moving forward to repeal the unlawful 
waters of the United States. This is one of the things, if you talk to 
the farmers throughout not just Oklahoma but throughout America, they 
will say, of all of the rules and regulations, this is the most 
harmful. This is No. 1. That is what they say. In fact, Tom Buchanan is 
the head of the Farm Bureau in the State of Oklahoma, and he says that 
is the problem.
  People are not aware. In my State of Oklahoma, when you get out into 
Western Oklahoma, it is dry out there. I mean, it is about as arid as 
any part of the United States. Yet we know, if they were to move that 
jurisdiction of water away from the States and to the Federal 
Government, as was proposed in a rule that was promulgated by the 
previous administration, that area in Western Oklahoma would be 
considered a wetland before it is over. Anyway, that is probably, 
singularly, the best of the rules that he changed.
  By the way, if anyone wants to see the rules--a lot of people say the 
President has not been doing anything. Most of these rules and 
regulations--there are up to 48 now--that have been costing jobs and 
putting people out of business have now been addressed by this 
administration, by the Trump administration, and very successfully. 
Right now, we are in the process of getting some of these things done.
  The waters rule is going to take a while to get done because that is 
going to take some hearings and so forth. Another of the rules the EPA 
is working on repealing is the Clean Power Plan. Now, this is the thing 
that came from the Paris show. In fact, I have done this before. I have 
talked about the history of these things that have been put forth for 
21 consecutive years now by the U.N., which is that they have these 
meetings. They get 196 countries together, and they try to see what 
they can do to get them to reduce CO2 emissions, when, in 
fact, they have not been able to do this.
  Besides that, 87 percent of the power that is developed to run our 
country is either from fossil fuels or it is nuclear. If you extract 
those, as they tried to do, how do you run the machine called America? 
The answer is, you can't.
  Anyway, as far as the Clean Power Plan, that was put together by 
President Obama, and it was something you could talk about as long as 
you wanted to, but the fact is, it was not good for the country. The 
rule was so unpopular that 27 States, 37 rural electric co-ops, and 3 
labor unions challenged it in court. The cost of the rule was estimated 
to be $292 billion, but I have seen estimates that are well in excess 
of $400 billion.
  The plan would raise electricity prices in 47 States; 40 of those 
States would see double-digit increases, and these increases would be 
shouldered by American families, many of whom already have to choose 
between making rent payments and paying their power bills or choosing 
between putting food on their tables or paying their power bills. The 
plan would also see the closure of 66 powerplants and eliminate over 
125,000 jobs in the coal industry--an industry that has already been 
struggling in recent years.
  The goal of this rule was to effectively end the use of coal-fired 
powerplants, which is a cheap and bountiful energy. What benefit would 
we get out of this? It would be more expensive energy.
  By the way, the whole idea of the Paris thing was not just the Clean 
Power Plan put forth by our President; it was also what other countries 
were forced to do. For example, in signing on to this deal in Paris, 
which everyone was so upset about, China committed, for the next 10 
years, to continue to increase, every 10 days, an additional coal-fired 
powerplant. Then they would try to reduce them after that.
  What kind of a deal is that? They look back at the United States and 
think they know what is going to happen to our manufacturing base. They 
would go to China if we had to do this thing.
  The most ridiculous thing about this is, the President's commitment 
under the Clean Power Plan was to reduce our CO2 emissions 
by somewhere between 26 and 28 percent by 2025. The problem with that 
is, it cannot be done. We even called in the EPA so they may tell us 
how this could be done, and they agreed it could not be done.
  Anyway, that is something that is behind us now. I commend Scott 
Pruitt for realizing the legal footing of this rule and seeing that the 
costs the American people will bear under this rule is not going to 
happen.
  Just last week, the EPA announced that it will end its controversial 
policy known as sue and settle. This is a good one. It is a policy that 
has cost the taxpayers an estimated $67 billion in new regulations that 
stemmed from this practice. How this works is that some extremist group 
will come in and sue the EPA for not doing something, and so they go 
into a settlement agreement with the EPA, and the EPA is in concert 
with them to come up with the very thing they were not able to get 
through legislatively. It is called sue and settle. You have heard the 
President talk about ending that practice. It is one that needs to be 
ended, and it is going to be. This practice circumvented the 
Administrative Procedure Act and usually ended up in settlements that 
were extremely beneficial to extremist groups and got them exactly what 
they wanted all the time.
  My State of Oklahoma was a victim of this practice. In 2011, the EPA 
used consent agreements that stemmed from court cases in other States, 
not in Oklahoma, as Oklahoma was not even part of it or aware of it. 
They do that to overrule the State's Regional Haze Plan to impose EPA's 
own costly plan on Oklahoma electricity ratepayers. Now, the plan the 
EPA has pushed on this State costs an estimated $282 million each year. 
That is just in our State of Oklahoma, and it is something we would 
have to pay for.
  The regional haze problem has nothing to do with health. It is all 
visibility. So this was ruining the theme of the Obama EPA. Never mind 
that regional haze is entirely a visibility issue and not a health 
issue, never mind that Congress specifically gave States the authority 
to regulate regional haze under the Clean Air Act in the amendments I 
strongly supported when they went through because it is a visibility 
issue and not a health issue. Yet because an environmentalist group did 
not like how Oklahoma was handling its own business, it sued the EPA in 
court outside of Oklahoma and did not include Oklahoma as a party in 
the case. The EPA capitulated and entered into an agreement with some 
of the extremists that conveniently required the EPA to impose its own 
expensive plan on my State of Oklahoma.

  So I am glad Administrator Pruitt has announced an end to this 
policy, and I urge my colleagues to take up S. 119. It is the Sunshine 
for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act, of which I am an original 
cosponsor, to ensure that this practice is ended across the government 
and cannot be implemented by future administrations.
  Finally, I would like to encourage the EPA to move ahead with a 
hinted-at, pending directive that would restrict scientists who receive 
EPA grants from serving on the Agency's scientific advisory committees. 
I have previously expressed concerns over the composition of the 
Agency's advisory committees for many reasons, including highlighting 
the fact that many science advisers under the Obama EPA, including a 
majority of those on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee--that 
is called CASAC--have received considerable financial support from the 
EPA. They are calling into question their independence and the overall 
integrity of panels on which the advisers sit.
  The National Academy of Sciences and the EPA's own ``Peer Review 
Handbook'' state that grants can constitute a conflict or a lack of 
impartiality. We are not talking about small grants either; we are 
talking about millions of dollars in grants. During the last year of 
the Obama administration, CASAC had six of seven members receiving 
these. Keep in mind, six of the seven members received a total of $119 
million in grants--in EPA research grants--and three of the members 
received in excess of $25 million each. These are the scientists who 
are making the decisions. There were 22 of the 26 members of the CASAC 
Subcommittee on Particulate Matter who

[[Page S6812]]

received more than $330 million in EPA grants.
  The scientists who receive vast sums of money from the very agencies 
they are advising certainly constitute a conflict of interest and, at a 
minimum, give an appearance of a lack of impartiality. As such, I 
welcome the news that Administrator Pruitt will be seeking to limit 
this worrisome practice.
  I have laid out only a few of the many great things the EPA is doing 
right now and what Administrator Pruitt is doing. I got to know him a 
long time ago. In fact, I flew him around the State in my airplane back 
when he ran for the first statewide office. He is a guy who is a tiger 
and who is doing the right thing. I am very proud of what they are 
doing.
  After this morning, the EPA is now advancing five EPA nominees for 
the EPA general counsel and for the Offices of Enforcement and 
Compliance Assurance, Air and Radiation, Water, and Chemical Safety and 
Pollution Prevention. Each of these nominees is needed for the issues I 
have talked about and for the many others that are on the Agency's 
plate.
  Scott Pruitt has been working on so much of the President's 
conservative agenda alone, and he needs help to run these policies. I 
call on my colleagues and the leadership to prioritize these 
nominations. You cannot get this stuff done unless you have help. We 
have never seen a time when we have gotten this far into an 
administration and have had this large of a number of people who have 
not been confirmed.
  Mr. President, I do want to mention one other thing because, for some 
reason, the Democrats have decided they are going to run out the whole 
30 hours on the confirmation of a guy named Scott Palk. I have to say, 
Scott Palk has been doing a great job. In fact, on the vote that just 
took place on him, he received 79 votes in the U.S. Senate. Yet, just 
to be obstructionists, they are still demanding 30 hours.
  Scott Palk is an experienced prosecutor with a decade of service. He 
was the assistant district attorney for Cleveland County in my State of 
Oklahoma and spent 9 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in the 
criminal division of the Western District of Oklahoma. He has a 
reputation for honesty, integrity, and a commitment to fairly applying 
the law. Mr. Palk will serve Oklahoma with distinction as a principled 
jurist who will uphold the Constitution.
  He is going to be confirmed. We know he is going to be confirmed 
because he already received 79 votes. There is no reason to delay it, 
other than to hold people here and be obstructionists. I would urge my 
friends on the other side of the aisle to go ahead and confirm the guy. 
He is going to do a great job.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Tillis). The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I have remarks that I wish to make, but I 
will yield at this time in order for the Republican leader to be 
recognized after which I will seek recognition.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Illinois.

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