Udall Foundation Reauthorization Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. MANCHIN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of amendment No. 1725, which will be called up later. My amendment is with Senator Crapo of Idaho, my dear friend. I want to speak a little bit about the EVs-- electric vehicles--and the tailpipe emissions rule that has been handed down.

The administration's electric vehicle policy has been held completely captive by the activist environmental groups and the radical advisers in the White House. I can't put it any other way than that.

First, they tried to bribe Americans to buy EVs by giving them $7,500, and now they are trying to mandate that we all must buy them after 2032--because they won't be produced anymore. So they have changed the rules. They basically tried to bribe them and still couldn't move them as quickly as they wanted to. Then, on top of that, they are saying that now we are going to pass a law to where you can't have an option of buying another type of vehicle for transportation.

That is just not the American way. It is not the way we were raised. It is not the way this country grew. Transportation is the foundation of our economy. If you think about it, never in the history of our country have we had to depend on other foreign supply chains--and especially unreliable foreign supply chains--for our transportation: our cars, our trains, our planes, and everything in between. We have been able to do it right here, and now we have thrown everything onto the backs of foreign supply chains because we don't have the critical minerals. We don't basically manufacture, and we don't produce them. We don't do anything with them, and we are trying to get up to speed.

The Inflation Reduction Act was and always will be an American energy security and a manufacturing bill. When I negotiated and started negotiating after the BBB was killed and then the war started in Ukraine, there was one moving factor that urged me to do that internally more than anything else. We couldn't help our allies--those who fought and died with us who needed our help now--and Putin weaponized energy. He weaponized his gas and his oil reserves that went into Europe, and here we were not able to help them at all. I said we had better do something. That is when we started negotiating and working on some way that we could be energy independent.

I will tell the Presiding Officer that, for the first time in 40 years, the United States of America is producing more energy today than ever in the history of this country. We are producing more energy than any other country in the world, and we should be proud of that, but my friends in the White House won't speak about it. All they want to tell you about is the environmental bill. It is the greatest environmental bill. We are producing more energy from wind and solar than ever before. We are doing everything, and they can't accept an all-energy policy, and it is unbelievable. We are replacing some of the dirtiest fuels in the world because of what we are producing--cleaner than anywhere else in the world. Venezuela--we let them back into the market. They wanted more oil in the market. OK. They let Venezuela back in. They produce oil with 80 percent more pollutants--more emissions-- than what we ever have.

So, anyway, the Inflation Reduction Act, like I have said before, was an American energy security and domestic energy bill. That is it. Can we have energy security, and can we basically have manufacturing coming back that should have never left, but we allowed it to leave? Let's bring it back so that we don't have to rely on unreliable foreign partners, if you will, foreign entities.

The White House wanted money for EVs. I wanted domestic manufacturing and a secure supply chain. We were at a standstill, and we couldn't move any further. So we had to compromise, and the compromise was pretty simple. The administration would only get money to incentivize people to buy an EV if we were making and sourcing these ingredients that we needed--the critical minerals--from America or a reliable supply chain, and that supply chain was countries that we already had free-trade agreements with.

Let me make sure you understand. Our main objective for this bill, the IRA, was this: We will not be doing business with foreign countries of concern, and those foreign countries were four, mainly: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. There is no way we should be depending on anything coming from them--that don't have our values--because they will use it as a wedge.

But the administration has completely liberalized and, in fact, broken the law that we agreed to and actually passed, and we have been having this continuous back-and-forth. I cannot believe, dealing in good faith, that we ended up with what we ended up with. We put strict but achievable standards in the IRA to ensure that China and other nations that don't share our values don't benefit off the backs of the American taxpayers and that we don't willingly give Xi Jinping, the President of China, a geopolitical weapon to use against us. I can guarantee, when he watched Putin weaponize energy, he surely was going to basically use the weaponization of all the critical minerals that we are using and all the things that we depend on from China--that he would have done the same thing with.

I remember waiting in long gas lines in 1974 to buy gasoline to go to work. I can remember those days vividly. I couldn't believe that the United States of America had gotten itself into that mess, but we did, but we got ourselves out of it too. Do you think China is not going to be using that to their advantage to bring us to our knees? Well, I am not going to be waiting in line for a battery to come from China, sir. Sorry.

But last year, the administration proposed cutting in half the IRA's requirements. This is how desperate they are to, basically, disregard the bill that we all agreed on in good faith and signed with the purpose of bringing manufacturing back. But with their ambition to get more EVs out the door quicker than ever before, they cut everything in half.

This is exactly what is written in the bill. This is it. The language is plain. By 2023, you should have 40 percent of the minerals that must be extracted or processed in the United States or free trade agreement countries or recycled in North America--40 percent.

Every year it went up so we would be more and more dependent on America, building up and building, basically, our ability to manufacture. This is exactly what they did.

Do you think it is a coincidence they cut everything in half from 40 percent? Now, this is what they admitted. This is what they are working with. This is their--they call them their new rules they have coming out, according to the Treasurer's proposed rules. I will get into why they call them proposed rules too.

This is what we intended to be self-sufficient. This is exactly what they intended to meet their political agenda to get these out the door quicker, cut everything in half.

The IRA set deadlines. Like I said before, the deadlines were 2023, 2024, to completely remove the countries from the critical minerals and battery manufacturing. We wrote language in the bill. If you read the IRA bill, it is written in there that we cannot do business with China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. That was the whole purpose. If you are going to go down this path, let's make sure we get something back for the American taxpayers but also for American manufacturing.

But now the IRS is proposing ``temporary'' exemptions through at least the end of 2026. When have you heard of temporary rules that would go through--they are supposed to be, basically, done by December 31, 2024. They put in their rules 2026 or later--or later.

That is another 3 years of China and other foreign nations reaching deeper into and controlling more of our electric vehicle battery supply chains. The longer we allow this to happen, the longer we allow this to happen by, basically, pushing our American energy and technologies quicker, then basically all we are doing is supporting China and the grip they have on us.

Worse yet, the IRS under this administration seems to have adopted a new legal strategy to avoid any accountability from the courts or Congress. Now, this is the real innovative, creative way they are thinking.

By you issuing ``proposed rules'' like this and never finalizing them, the IRS can break the law--legally break the law--implement it in any way they wish it was passed. I have said this from day one: You are implementing a piece of legislation you never passed. I tell the White House that every day: You didn't pass this. The law we passed tells you exactly what to do. You are trying to implement something that you would like to do, but you never did.

And they do it with proposed rules because they think that basically protects them from any litigation.

That is a breach of everything that we agreed, a breach of everything that we agreed to in good faith and not the way the government in this great country of ours should ever, ever operate.

Let me be clear, there is no question that the IRA will be one of the most transformative bills in the way it was written. It is an all-of- the-above. It was an all-purpose bill. It was a balance between the energy that we need today, the fossil fuels, that we are going to do them cleaner, and the technology of the energy we want in the future. That is exactly what the bill was supposed to do. It was supposed to bring back manufacturing that we let go, basically, with the NAFTA agreement-- North American Free Trade Agreement--way back when, in the 1980s and 1990s, and then now with what we are dealing with, with bringing China and the WTO in the late 1990s, early 2000s. We have allowed things to leave our country. We should have never allowed the manufacturing base to ever leave.

Let's be clear, there is no question that the IRA will go down as one of the most transformational bills that we have ever passed. It is bringing opportunity. It surely is. It is bringing opportunity in areas that got left behind.

Electric vehicle and battery makers announced $52 billion in investments in North American supply chains before the IRS even started loosening the rules. They want to come back to America. They want to build. But as long as you basically allow the foreign entities of concern--the Chinas of the world--to continue to flood the market with cheaper prices, our people will never be able to have a foothold as far as manufacturing in the United States. That is the problem.

We knew it would take a couple of years for us to get up to speed, but we will never get up to speed as long as they can still buy cheaper products somewhere else.

Numbers like this show that breaking the law doesn't get us more investment; it just makes the costs go up for every American taxpayer and sends our tax dollars overseas. We are trying to bring that manufacturing back and keep those dollars here, not in China or Russia.

But even bribing Americans with a liberalized, unlawful $7,500 wasn't good enough for the administration because it doesn't meet their political timetable to eliminate gas-powered vehicles. If they had a good enough product--a product in America--the market usually will react. The market will reject or accept. They won't do it on your timetable. But when you have the government behind you, pushing you in a way to force the options you may have, that is not how we built the country that we have. It is not how we built this capitalist mentality or this entrepreneurship. It is just not who we are.

The EPA piled on by proposing these new tailpipe rules that force automakers to limit consumer choice and force Americans to buy EVs full of Chinese parts. That is exactly what is happening now.

The EPA wants more than two-thirds of the new cars to be electric by 2032, when there is only 8 percent of them that are electric today. They can't meet that goal unless it is buying overseas, which is what we tried to stop. Their intention is to continue to flood the market any way they possibly can for their own political agenda by their extreme environmental climates at the destruction, basically, of our own jobs, our own economy.

The only way it would be possible to get anywhere close, like I said before, is to do business with other foreign countries, because China has a lock on most of all the markets--anodes, cathodes, 80 percent of that; basically, rare-earth minerals, about 60 to 80 percent of that. They have been doing this for quite a while. We want to get back up to speed, but we can't do it by continuing to support them.

Xi Jinping is already showing that he will use critical minerals as leverage to put Americans and the free world at risk by directing the Chinese Government to implement new restrictions on exports of several critical minerals. Now he really starts putting the choke on us. He sees that we have legislation that is going to force us to buy a product that he has control over.

Can you imagine us getting ourselves into a jam where we are going to be dependent upon China for their critical minerals and the battery components that we need to run the vehicles that we decide to change our transportation mode to before we are ready to do it ourselves? I would expect that from Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, but I can't believe that we would be dumb enough to play into their hands. It is unbelievable. There is nobody who you can talk to in the industry who doesn't understand exactly what I am saying.

I never could have expected our own government to give up so easily and continue to let foreign--foreign--nations control our Nation's transportation. You know, I even said this to--they told me about all the charging stations that we have to spend billions and billions of dollars on, the Federal Government, the Federal taxpayers. I do not remember when Henry Ford, basically, was able to have the production of the Model T and bring it into mass production where the average person could buy it, that we said: Oh, oh, we have to go out and start building filling stations. I don't think the Federal Government built filling stations to meet the demands of the market. The market did it, and the market will do it again.

They say: Oh, no, we can't do that. We can't take a chance on the market, so let's go ahead and just commit billions and billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to do what the market has always done for America.

I will do everything in my power to hold this administration accountable to the deal we made--and intended to deal; everybody knew about it--to protect America's taxpayers and to secure our energy supply chains.

If we are going to do it, let's do it and benefit from it. Let's build America back. Let's do what we do best. Let's innovate and create. Let's believe in the market and allow the market, basically, to force us to work as it has always worked for America.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment that is coming up because I can tell you one thing: We have got to send a signal that this country is able to take care of itself; we are able to compete for ourself; and we should not depend on unreliable foreign supply chains for the most critical building blocks of our country.

Transportation basically keeps the lights on. It keeps food on your table. It does everything necessary for us to live a quality of life in this country. To allow and give it up because we are not in control of our transportation mode is absolutely criminal.

With that, I would say I hope all of my colleagues will look at this amendment very seriously and see how important it is for us to maintain this tremendous independence this country has always had.

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