Senator Kit Bond Questions Global Warming Bill

Text of Senator Kit Bond’s statement on the Senate floor, 7 July 2009

July 7, 2009

Madame Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing today on global warming legislative tools.  The problem is that it will fail to cover the most important legislative tool, and that is the one you intend this committee to consider and mark up at the end of the month.

The American people and my Missouri constituents deserve to know how the legislation we consider will:  impose new energy taxes upon them, kill their jobs, punish the Midwest and South, help China and India, and construct a new bureaucratic nightmare to implement a carbon cap and trade program.

Some say that we should just look to the bill the House passed last month - and to that I say which one?  We have the 648 page Discussion Draft.  We have the 932 page Introduced Bill.  We have the 946 page Committee Substitute.  We have the 1,201 page Floor Filed Bill.  We have the 500 page Redline Version.  We have the 743 page Committee Report.  We have the 309 page Manager’s Amendment filed at 3 AM the morning of the floor debate.  And, we have the 1,427 page House Passed Bill.  In total, that is 6,706 pages or 15 inches of legislative material.

For those who say that we should work off the House passed bill, we have a prominent environmental advocate here today who will testify that we should abandon the floor compromises benefitting agriculture and go back to the committee passed version.

And we have the fresh experience of the most recent legislation this committee considered where the Chairman adopted a complete substitute the day of the markup and then berated members for not reading that substitute.  We deserve better.  The American people deserve better.

The American people and my Missouri constituents deserve to know why it takes 1,427 pages to address energy issues.  What needles are the Majority trying to hide in this haystack?  What backroom deals were made to buy support?  What provisions were added in the middle of the night?  How will the bureaucratic nightmare this bill creates work?

And what a nightmare it will be with EPA at the center of a great web of government mandates, programs and taxes.  EPA will have help from nearly 2 dozen other federal agencies, the black boxes on the bottom, some here today and many not, implementing government programs that will tax and spend trillions of dollars, the grey, green, purple and brown boxes on the sides and middle.

All of this will focus through our power bills, cooling & heating bills, food prices, product prices, gasoline prices and jobs, threatening families with higher prices, farmers with higher prices, drivers with higher prices, and workers with lost jobs.

All of this is to ask what are our Democratic colleagues afraid of?  If they are not afraid of us knowing what this will do to our families and workers, why are we not having hearings on the legislation itself?  Why do we not have this legislation now?  I hope we will soon get answers to these questions and many more.

Thank you.