National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, for some time, including times on this floor, I have said that the choice between a clean environment and a strong economy is a false one. Some people say you can't have a clean environment and a strong economy at the same time. I just don't think that is correct. TSCA is an acronym for Toxic Substances Control Act.

The TSCA reform legislation that we approved in this body last night is proof of the fact that we can have a cleaner, safer, and healthier environment and also have a strong economy. They go together, and maybe, when I finish my remarks, folks will understand why that might be true.

Every day in this country manufacturers use a variety of chemicals. I am told there are tens of thousands of chemicals on this planet. It is in the air, in the ground, in the water, and in our bodies. Manufacturers use these chemicals to make everything from carpets--like the carpet we are standing on--to cosmetics, water bottles, and dish washing soap.

Former President Gerald Ford signed the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 and said it was landmark legislation. He said that this is huge legislation in terms of protecting the environment and public health. He said it was intended to give the EPA the authority to monitor, test, and regulate the chemicals that pose a risk to human health or the environment. That was the deal. Over the past four decades, since Gerald Ford signed that legislation into law, the Toxic Substances Control Act has never worked as intended, leaving the public at risk for toxic exposures and the private sector with a broken regulatory process that has undermined innovation. Frankly, it led to a lot of uncertainty and lack of predictability.

As a recovering Governor, I know that among the things we need in order to have a better and more nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation is to make certain that businesses, whether large or small, have predictability and certainty. When the Toxic Substances Control Act passed 40 years ago, it did not provide that predictability and certainty.

In fact, for the last 40 years, I think the EPA has fully vetted six toxic substances. Imagine that--six in 40 years. In the last 20 to 25 years, there were none. In the meantime, States have stood up and said: If the Federal Government is not going to do it, we will do it. Now we have a patchwork quilt of State requirements. We have businesses--not just chemical businesses but a wide variety of businesses--in this country that are trying to comply with laws in dozens of States, and the Federal standard that we set 40 years ago just does not work.

For a while, the Toxic Substances Control Act has been broken. That is a polite way of saying it. Over the past 39 years, we have learned a lot more about toxic chemicals. We have learned about how they can cause harm to our environment. They can cause harm to public health, and we also learned how best to identify and protect against these risks.

More than 3 years ago, two of my colleagues--one a Democrat, Tom Udall of New Mexico, and the other a Republican, Dave Vitter of Louisiana--wrote something called the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. That is a mouthful, isn't it?

Frank R. Lautenberg was a Senator from New Jersey for many years, whose birthday I remember to this day. He is now deceased, but his birthday is January 23, and the reason why I know that is because that is when my birthday is. This is an issue we actually shared a strong interest in doing something about.

My recollection--it is hard to remember when people move around from desk to desk--is that his seat was back here behind where I am standing today.

My colleagues Tom Udall and David Vitter wrote a bill and named it after Frank R. Lautenberg because this is an issue he cared a lot about. He tried several times to write legislation that could be enacted to take the 40-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act from 1976 and bring it into the 21st century and help it become effective and make sense for the digital age.

The bill written by Senators Udall and Vitter reforms the old Toxic Substances Control Act, and it does it in ways to better protect the public--to protect us, our families, our businesses, and so forth. It is also designed to create a more manageable regulatory framework for American businesses and innovators so they have some predictability and certainty with what they are dealing with. Whether they happen to be doing business in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Wyoming, Idaho, or California, they would have some certainty as to what the rules of the road were going to be for toxic substances or the chemicals they might be using in their processes.

After the bill was introduced by Senators Vitter and Udall, I worked closely with both of them for more than a year as a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. We led a number of meetings, had many discussions, and we were always focused on securing enhanced protections for public health and the environment while providing certainty and predictability for American businesses.

I focused especially on language to secure provisions that would protect children, pregnant women, and workers from toxic risk. The provisions I especially focused on included ensuring that the EPA had access to information in order for them to assess safety risks.

A third area that I looked at was to enact something to allow States to enforce Federal toxic safety law. If the EPA wasn't doing its job, could there be a State backstop in a way that made sense? I think that was not an unreasonable thing to ask. We did that in Dodd-Frank with respect to nationally chartered banks. If the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in nationally chartered banks is not making sure consumers are being looked after, then we allow State attorneys general--not to write regulations or their own law but to enforce Federal standards and laws. I wanted to make sure that in the event that someday we had an EPA that frankly wouldn't enforce a new version of the substance control act, then States could enforce it for them.

Chemical manufacturers and consumers alike deserve legal clarity, a timely review process, and the ability to trust that products people use every day are safe. I might add that when Senator Udall and Senator Vitter started to introduce this legislation and started to gather cosponsors--I don't mean to be presumptuous, but my guess is the Presiding Officer probably ended up as a cosponsor. At the end of the day, we had 30 Democrats and 30 Republicans. The idea was to add a Democrat, add a Republican, add a Democrat, add a Republican--a little bit of a look at how a bill is made or should be made. It is almost a textbook example of how legislation could be formed or should be formed, even on a difficult and contentious issue like the one I am talking about today.

I was involved at the very beginning in the initial efforts to rewrite the Toxic Substance Control Act. I was involved with David Vitter and Tom Udall and also the chairman of the committee, Jim Inhofe. But I got to a point where I said to the coauthors of the legislation--they were looking for cosponsors, and I said: I will be willing to cosponsor your version of the rewriting of the Toxic Substance Control Act, but there are 10 changes that I would like to consider making.

They said: What are they?

I said: Well, here they are.

And I gave them some idea of what they were. They asked me to put them in writing, so I put them in writing in a letter to Senators Vitter and Udall and said: These are the changes I would like to see made in the bill you have introduced. If you will make these changes or agree to these changes, I will cosponsor your bill, and not only will I cosponsor your bill, but so will 10 or 11 other Democrats. We all signed the letter. This was probably about a year and a half ago.

The letter was more to Senator Vitter than Senator Udall; I think it went to both. But to his credit, Senator Vitter and his staff went through it piece by piece, proposal by proposal--all 10 of them. At the end of the day, they agreed essentially with all of them, and they said that they would incorporate all 10 of the proposals in the bill. They said: Now will you cosponsor the bill?

And I said: Yes, I will. And so did the rest of us who signed the letter--all 10 of us.

When I said that I would cosponsor the bill, I also said there were three areas that still needed some work. My passion for pushing for this legislation will be tempered somewhat by your willingness to also act on subsequent changes in the bill in these three areas. I will not go into those three areas, but I will say that later on, some of my colleagues--Senators Cory Booker, Senator Whitehouse, Senator Jeff Merkley, and Senator Ed Markey--sort of stepped up and said: We are interested in those three areas, and we want to see further changes made in the bill.

With those changes, we added even more cosponsors, and finally we ended up with 60. We said: Let's take that bill to the Senate. It reported out of committee and eventually worked through the Senate. It was not easy, but we finally got it done. We went to conference with the House, and, lo and behold, we passed a conference report unanimously last night by unanimous consent, and nobody objected. Considering how controversial this bill has been for years, that is amazing.

At a press conference we held today with the principal Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, one of the House Members came over. Senator Tom Udall talked about how he felt elated to be able to unanimously pass a contentious bill after all these years. He likened it to standing on a mountaintop. He is a mountain climber. In New Mexico they have some tall mountains, and he said it was like standing on a mountain top. He said: I feel elation when I climb to the top of a tall mountain and stand atop the mountain. And he said this morning at the press conference that he felt elation as well.

Then, when I spoke after Senator Udall, I said that in Delaware we don't have tall mountains. Delaware is the lowest lying State in America. We really worry about climate change and sea levels rising. Besides that being some theory, it is something that we worry about. So the highest part of land in Delaware is a bridge. Every now and again, if I want to go up high and climb something, I can climb the bridge, but it is not really that high.

The thing that gave me elation in Delaware when I was Governor--and before that the State treasurer and all--was when we all worked together. Delaware has a tradition; we call it the Delaware way. It is where Democrats and Republicans work together, set aside partisan differences, and just ask: What is the right thing to do?

Delaware is a small State. We can get pretty much the key stakeholders in a room and work out a lot of our differences within a couple of hours. It is pretty amazing how it works sometimes.

I share with my colleagues today an African proverb. The Presiding Officer has probably heard this before, and he has probably used this one before. It goes something like this: ``If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go together.''

Let me say that again. ``If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go together.''

That is especially true in the Senate. In order to get anything of any consequence done, you need 60 votes. We are at about 55 Republicans, and roughly there are about 45 Democrats with maybe an Independent in there somewhere. So we have to figure out how to travel together.

We have been traveling a long way over the last 4 years or so, but we finally got to our destination, and I think we finally came to a good outcome in terms of the policy we have adopted. For the first time, the legislation that has been agreed to by the House and Senate and will be sent to the President will require that every product used in consumer products will be assessed for safety.

Let me say that again. Every chemical used in consumer products will be assessed for safety. At the same time, our legislation will offer businesses a predictable and manageable regulatory framework--not a whole bunch of different regulatory frameworks, but one--for chemicals that do not pose a safety hazard.

As I said, we have been struggling and negotiating this bill in the Senate for a long time--maybe as much as a half dozen years. There has been a lot of give and take on both sides of the aisle to get to where we are last night and today. We are where we are today because both sides worked together to compromise on policies without compromising on our principles.

I mentioned that Frank Lautenberg used to sit at one of these desks behind me, and so did Ted Kennedy. I will never forget going and having a lunch with him when I was fairly new in the Senate. I wasn't sure that we had the kind of interpersonal relationship that I wanted, and as the Presiding Officer knows, this place works a lot on relationships.

I said to him: Maybe someday I can come to your office and just sit and talk with you for a while and have a cup of coffee.

He said: Why don't you come to my hideaway, and we will have lunch together.

I said: Really?

He said: Yes.

After about a week or two, we went to his hideaway, and we had lunch together. His hideaway was an amazing place. It was almost like a museum in terms of all the things about the Kennedy family and his brothers and his own life.

Among the things we talked about that day was his ability to find compromise and consensus with one of our current colleagues, a guy named Mike Enzi--a wonderful guy named Mike Enzi who the Presiding Officer knows is one of two Senators from Wyoming, a former mayor of Gillette, an accountant--I think maybe a CPA. When I was presiding over the Senate years ago, I remember Mike Enzi coming to the floor of the Senate and speaking about the 80-20 rule and how the 80-20 rule allowed the folks in a committee he served on as the senior Republican called the HELP Committee, or the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--Ted Kennedy was the senior Democrat on that committee. It was an incredibly productive committee. There were all kinds of bipartisan legislation coming out of it.

Later on that day I asked Senator Enzi off the floor: How do you and Ted Kennedy manage to get so much done in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee? How do you do that?

He said: It is the 80-20 rule.

I said: What's that?

He said: Ted Kennedy and I agree on about 80 percent of this stuff, and we disagree on the other 20 percent. What we do is we focus on the 80 percent where we agree, and we set aside the other 20 percent to another day and we will figure that out some other time.

When I talked to Ted Kennedy about the same thing, he said: I am always willing to compromise on policy, process, but I just don't want to compromise on my principles. He and Mike Enzi managed to have an incredibly productive partnership on that committee and here in the Senate.

Senator Kennedy had a similar relationship with Orrin Hatch, who now chairs the Finance Committee, as we know.

But we are where we are today because both Democrats and Republicans have worked together to compromise on policy without having to compromise our principles. The final product is a testament to a robust and a transparent committee process. I think it is a textbook example of how we ought to legislate around here. If we can get something that difficult, that complex, and that controversial behind us in an appropriate way and get support from environmental groups, business groups, Democrats and Republicans, maybe there are some other things we can get done, and God knows we need to.

I am proud of the work we have done together to reach this historic agreement. In addition to thanking Senator Udall, Senator Vitter, and the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Inhofe, I also want to say a special thank-you to the members of our staff. I think those of us who serve or are privileged to work here as Senators work hard, but on this issue--and some of us worked hard on this issue, but the folks who really worked hard on this issue are the members of our staff. I will not go through the names of all the folks who worked with this Senator and that Senator, but I just want to say to those of you who know who you are, thank you. You have done great work, and you have enabled us to do the people's work.

I would say to a fellow who was a member of my staff for the last maybe 3 years and who worked day and night on this legislation--a fellow named Colin Peppard who now works for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority out on the west coast--a special shout out to him and a special thank-you to him for all his efforts.

Mr. President, I think that is pretty much it for me today. It looks as though the Senator from Minnesota is here and has a hungry look on his face. He hungers to share something with all of us.

With that having been said, I will yield the floor to Senator Franken of Minnesota.

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