Shelley Moore Capito Leads Senate Environment And Public Works Committee Business Meeting

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3 months ago

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a business meeting.

Transcript

00:00of a quorum, and I'm going to call this business meeting to order. Thank you all for being here.

00:04For the information of the members of the committee, ranking member Whitehouse and I

00:07will deliver our opening statements, and once we have sufficient attendance, we will vote on the

00:1110 GSA resolutions en banc, and then following that vote, we will proceed to the vote on one

00:16pending nominee. After the roll call vote, members who wish to be recognized to speak on the

00:21nomination may do so. So now I'm going to give my opening statement to welcome and thank my

00:29colleagues for attending today, but also to vote on the nomination of Catherine Scarlett

00:33to be a member of the Council on Environmental Quality, or CEQ. Catherine is an excellent

00:39choice to lead CEQ. As CEQ's current chief of staff, she has worked with federal agencies

00:44to implement the Bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act and coordinate updates to agencies' individual

00:50NEPA procedures to reflect recent court decisions and executive policies. She's also led the

00:56effort in this administration to modernize the NEPA process through the use of technology.

01:01Prior to her current position, she worked here for me at the committee in EPW and served

01:07at both CEQ and the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council in the previous Trump administration,

01:14experiences that make her well-qualified to lead the Council. I urge my colleagues to support

01:19this nomination, and I look forward to her swift consideration on the floor. I also encourage

01:24my colleagues to support the 10 GSA resolutions that will authorize important repair and alteration

01:29projects across the country. With that, I'll turn to Ranking Member Whitehouse for his opening statement.

01:34Thanks very much. I understand we'll take Jeffrey Hall up at some later opportunities, so I'll reserve

01:40comment on him other than to let the colleagues on my side know that I vociferously oppose his nomination

01:49to the enforcement office, whose policy nowadays seems to be non-enforcement. Basically, the polluter fox is in the henhouse,

01:59and it's a sad state of affairs. As to Ms. Scarlett, I support the work that CEQ, under her leadership,

02:07is undertaking to implement E-NEPA updates to modernize federal permitting process. I will vote yes on her nomination.

02:15This work is long overdue. In November, a DC Circuit panel ruled, without actually any party raising the issue,

02:23that CEQ lacked the authority to issue NEPA regulations. That leaves our fractured agencies

02:30to develop each their own guidance, creating an inefficient patchwork of divergent rules and inconsistent

02:38applications of a law. This makes permitting reform an even greater priority, and I look forward to

02:45working with Ms. Scarlett to advance that ball. However, how can we do permitting reform in the face of an

02:56administration that seems lawlessly to disrespect the permitting and appropriations process? If we were

03:08to work out a deal, and I hope we will, what's the point if the President and his cronies can just simply ignore

03:20the law and do whatever it is that they wish based on special interest influence. That seems to be where

03:26we are right now. If they're not following well established laws, why would we trust them to follow

03:32a new permitting reform law? So there's going to have to be some clarity about that as we move towards

03:37permitting reform. Two things happened in Rhode Island during the course of the break that I want

03:43to flag for my colleagues. One, a grant for the port of Davisville was simply undone by the administration.

03:55It's hard to know exactly what was intended. As a ranking member, I did not get the courtesy of an

04:02advance call saying that this was coming. It just blew up in the paper suddenly that all of these port dollars

04:08were gone. We have seen the what I call the heresy hunt, where you have to go through

04:16applications and remove heretical language that the far right doesn't like, like equity or climate,

04:25that kind of stuff. If this is a heresy hunt, then we can keep going with the grant. If we can change the

04:30words so that people aren't triggered and offended by language in the original application. Okay, that's one

04:37thing. We're trying to get an answer to that. If it's just blown up, that's another thing. If the goal

04:43here is to target offshore wind, which I think is an idiotic mistake, well the port of Davisville does

04:49a lot more than offshore wind. It's the largest car entrant in New England in the northeast. Huge business

04:59there. It's an old facility that needs peers rebuilt just because of age. It's right adjacent to where

05:10we build our submarines. And so we can find a lot of uses for that money if the problem is that it's

05:19got an offshore wind contingent to it, or we can find Rhode Island uses for that money. But I need to

05:24sort that out. I don't think it's sensible to go forward in a situation in which the administration

05:31is unilaterally yanking funding without notice to the ranking member on the committee without a proper

05:37explanation or an understanding of how you repair that. The same thing happened with respect to

05:43Revolution Wind. Rhode Island takes some pride in having been the place where we figured out the sighting

05:50for offshore wind. And an enormous industry emerged about a little over a week ago when a thousand

06:00trades workers were putting their gear together to go out and do their well-paid work on this facility

06:11which is already 80% complete. Out of the clear blue sky with no notice or warning came a stop work order

06:21bringing the entire project to a halt. The vessels working on it came up into Narragansett Bay because

06:28they had no work to do out there. There's been no plausible explanation of why other than the individual

06:36predilections of a president who doesn't like windmills. They said national security but there's

06:42been no explanation of what national security issues there are or why this region has a national security

06:49problem but not the one off Virginia that's near the Norfolk naval station and that is used far more for

06:56aviation and navy operations than our area. So it makes no sense whatsoever. And in an environment where

07:06people are being hurt like that for what seem to be just oddball unjustified reasons again you couldn't be

07:20making it harder to get permitting reform done, to get a big highway bill done, to get WERDA done. If the

07:32purpose, if this was a strategy to make Democrats aggravated so that they wouldn't do those bills,

07:41it would be hard for the administration to improve on what it's doing. To the chairman, I know you've

07:48worked together with me on a lot of things and I appreciate your continued effort and I hope that we

07:53can continue to work our way through these problems as we have others in the past. But these are real

07:59problems when stuff is just being unilaterally spontaneously out of no place without warning

08:05or explanation blown up in the face of literally a thousand workers who were putting their gear

08:12together that week to go out to the job and suddenly they're unemployed. That just isn't what I don't

08:18think workers expected if they voted for Trump and it certainly is damaging and aggravating in Rhode Island.

08:26So I'll leave it at that and thank you for your hearing me out. All right, thank you. And at this

08:33time I'm going to ask senators to hold their remarks until after the votes. So to begin, the ranking member

08:38and I have agreed to consider the committee resolutions before us on block by voice vote. I move to consider

08:4310 committee resolutions to approve prospectuses from the General Services Administration. Is there a second?

08:50Second. Thank you. Yes. All those in favor say aye. All those opposed say nay. In the opinion of the

08:58chair, the ayes have it. With that, the resolution is approved. I will now call up presidential nomination

09:04345-16. Catherine Scarlett of Ohio to be a member of the Council of Environmental Quality. I move to approve

09:12and report the nomination favorably. Is there a second? Second. Thank you very much. The clerk will call the roll.

09:17Ms. Alsabrooks. No. Ms. Blunt Rochester. No. Mr. Bozeman. Aye. Mr. Kramer. Aye. Mr. Curtis. Aye. Mr. Graham.

09:31Mr. Graham votes aye by proxy. Mr. Houston. Aye. Mr. Kelly. Aye. Ms. Lummis. Aye. Mr. Markey. No by proxy. Mr. Merkley.

09:48No by proxy. Mr. Padilla. No. Mr. Ricketts. Aye. Mr. Sanders. No by proxy. Mr. Schiff. No. Mr. Sullivan. Aye.

10:02Mr. Whitehouse. Aye. Mr. Wicker. Aye. Madam Chairman. Aye.

10:08The clerk will report the yeas and nays. Madam Chairman, the yeas are 12 and the nays are 7.

10:19With that, the nominee is favorably reported and I note the presence of a quorum. So I want to thank you

10:24again to all of our members.

Shelley Moore Capito Leads Senate Environment And Public Works Committee Business Meeting

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