Senate Watch: Alexander, Baucus, Boxer, Collins, Inhofe, Reid, Specter
Max Baucus (D-Mont.)E&E News I am disappointed that Senator Boxer and the Democrats have reported another 1,000-page bill without a full understanding of what it will cost. Republicans want and expect to participate in any bill about clean energy, but taxpayers expect us to know what this bill costs before we start voting on it.
Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)E&E News I’m going to work to get climate change legislation that can get 60 votes through the U.S. Senate and signed into law.
E&E News We believe that to go back to another analysis when we already have an unprecedented amount of work based on 350,000 pages would be a waste of taxpayer dollars, would be duplicative.
Susan Collins (R-Maine)E&E News Now we take the best of Kerry-Boxer, the best of the energy bill, the best ideas from Agriculture, from Commerce, and meld together a bill. And this was a very important step in that process.
James Inhofe (R-Ok.)E&E News The members of the EPW Committee have got to make decisions on the bill that’s before them. And to require them to make decisions on incomplete information strikes me as foolhardy and as foreclosing any possibility of Republican support. I don’t know why you’d want to do that.
Harry Reid (D-Nev.)E&E News In the history of this, we’ve not been able to find a time when a bill has been marked up without minority participation.
Arlen Specter (D-Penn.)EnviroKnow The committee’s action today is a critically important step toward crafting a good strong clean energy and climate bill. There is much more work yet to do to obtain broad support for bipartisan legislation that can quickly put our nation on a path of reducing emissions cost-effectively and creating jobs and a cleaner more secure future.
E&E News I think the senators you have mentioned will look to substance, rather than form. And there will be that EPA analysis at a later time. This bill is going to be changed markedly, when you move down the road. So they will get substantively what they want.
Copenhagen is very important symbolically. And Copenhagen would have been more impressed had we moved further. But Copenhagen will be impressed at least that we have the resoluteness to move ahead now.