[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 198 (Wednesday, December 11, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6974-S6975]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Federal Regulations

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, on Monday I spoke at the annual meeting of 
the Missouri Farm Bureau, and, in our State, as in, frankly, almost 
every other State, the No. 1 economic activity in terms of value 
produced is agriculture.
  Where we live in the middle of the country, we do better in an 
economy that focuses on growing things and making things than we do on 
an economy that focuses more on giving advice--not that we don't want 
to give a lot of advice, but the truth is we don't want to get a lot of 
advice, either.
  So there is nothing wrong with a service-based economy, and there is 
nothing wrong with an important service sector in our economy, but 
America, in so many ways, was built on a productive economy, on an 
economy that produced something and something tangible. I think we have 
a chance to see those things happen again.
  Where we are located, almost exactly in the middle of the country, 
the Mississippi River Valley is the biggest piece of contiguous 
agricultural land in the world. Compared to the near competitors in 
size, it is the only one of them that has its own built-in, natural 
transportation center.
  In fact, there are more miles of navigable river in the Mississippi 
River Valley than in the rest of the world put together. I didn't say 
more river than the rest of the world put together because that 
wouldn't be true, but more miles of river that you can actually 
navigate--river you can use as an avenue of transportation and commerce 
than everywhere else in the world put together.
  For an economy that is trying to reach out to the world or trying to 
efficiently compete, that is a big advantage.
  So at the Farm Bureau meeting, at least three of the things the 
people I talked to were most interested in were regulation, 
transportation, and trade.
  When it comes to regulation, Missouri farm families understand that 
many of the best things that have happened to them in the past 3 years 
have been the things that didn't happen. There was a terrible 
regulation proposed--waters of the U.S.--in which the EPA was trying to 
decide that their authority over navigable water would be authority 
over all the water. Suddenly, navigable water had become, under the 
Obama EPA, any water that could run into any water that could run into 
any water that could run into any water that eventually would run into 
navigable water. If that is how we want to define it, the Congress 
should decide that, not the EPA.
  I stood on this floor many times during that terrifying time when the 
EPA was about to take over anything that related to water, from the new 
sidewalk in front of your house to whether you pave your driveway to 
whether you could set a utility pole without EPA approval.
  With the Farm Bureau map of Missouri, I think 99.7 percent of our 
State would have met the new EPA definition of the water the EPA would 
regulate. The other 0.3 percent, I think, were sinkholes that went 
directly back into the middle of the Earth. So virtually 100 percent of 
all Missourians would have been affected by that.
  It would have slowed the economy in an incredible way because the EPA 
could never have exercised effectively the jurisdiction they were 
asking for. The good news is, it didn't happen.
  The Trump administration moved forward with a Clean Water Act that 
made more sense. They listened to rural America. They listened to the 
people who build houses, to the people who provide power, and to the 
people who provide jobs, and they said: We are not going to go in that 
direction.
  Then there was the Obama Clean Power Plan, which sounds like a good 
thing. Clean power--I am not opposed to that, and I don't know anybody 
who is. We want power to be as clean as you can reasonably expect it to 
be. But the Obama Clean Power Plan was so aggressive in its approach 
that where I live, the average utility bill at home and at work would 
have doubled in about 10 years.
  Well, lots of things work at today's utility rate--or some gradual 
increase of today's utility rate--that just frankly wouldn't work if 
the utility bill doubled.
  That didn't happen either. In fact, we reversed course, and there is 
now an affordable clean energy rule making its way into law and 
regulation that really understands that.
  Again, if you at home write your utility check and then write it out 
of your checkbook again, a lot of things that you would do at your 
house you wouldn't be able to do if you had to pay your utility bill 
twice. Frankly, the job you may have may not be there if you had to pay 
your utility bill twice.
  Also, when thinking about making something in America today--and I 
think there is a lot of interest in bringing manufacturing that has 
gone overseas back to this country for lots of reasons, but when you 
think about making something in America today, the first question you 
would ask yourself would be this: Can we do what we want to do and pay 
the utility bill? The second question would be this: Does the 
transportation work for what we want to do? If the answer to either of 
those questions is no, then there is no reason to ask a third question. 
There is no reason to talk about workforce. There is no reason to talk 
about tax structure in the place you are thinking about locating. There 
is no reason to ask any other question if you can't do what you want to 
do, pay the utility bill, and still have some profit.
  There is no reason to talk about--if you can't do what you want to 
do--having a transportation system that allows you to do what you want 
to do. Those things are critically important, and they were critically 
important at the Farm Bureau meeting. They certainly understood it 
takes good highways, good State roads, and it takes a strong 
understanding of connecting highways, roads, railroads, and water 
together that will allow you to compete.
  The last continuing resolution on this issue that we passed just a 
few weeks ago actually funded the fifth year of the highway bill that 
was passed 4 years ago. It provided for 5 years of authority but only 4 
years of money.
  That $7.6 billion allows the transportation systems in our States and 
many things in our communities to happen. It allows county bridges to 
be built.

[[Page S6975]]

Missouri would lose $350 million in Federal highway funds if we hadn't 
figured out how to fund that fifth year, which we did figure out just a 
few days ago. Knowing that is going to happen allows people to begin to 
look forward to other things.