Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, as all of our colleagues know, we have been working very hard to come together around a reasonable path to provide some support and assistance to the people of Flint, MI, who got up this morning--if they took a shower, it was with bottled water. If they were getting breakfast for their children, if a mom was mixing baby food formula, it was with bottled water.

That has gone on now, for some people, 18 months or more. I mean, originally, they were told the water was safe, and they were drinking it and then found incredibly high lead levels in their children. Now it is bottled water. We have businesses downtown who have gone to the expense of creating their own water systems that are totally safe, but no one will come. Doors are closing.

We have small businesses in neighborhoods--we have a revitalization effort in downtown Flint that has been really quite extraordinary. The chamber, a wide variety of organizations, the University of Michigan- Flint, a whole range of groups investing in downtown Flint.

This is all collapsing because of the fact that people are afraid to come and to drink the water or to eat food mixed with the water, even though our businesses downtown are doing things to rectify this right now. The citizens of Flint, rightly, are in a position where they have been told that the water was safe to drink. They gave it to their children. It wasn't. They are poisoned.

Now they are in a situation where they have great despair and great anger. I share in both of those feelings, a multitude of feelings, as does my friend and colleague Senator Peters. We are joined together in our commitment on a whole range of efforts to be able to help the children and families of Flint. There was one report--by the way, this is what the water looks like--brown, smells.

There was one story on the news of a house where they went to talk with folks and looked at the lead levels. It was above toxic waste dump levels. I talked to a mom who talked about--and I heard another mom as well, being interviewed, saying: You know, I took my children off of what we call pop in Michigan, other people call it soda, Coke, Pepsi, because I was told that was not healthy for my children. So when my children were playing last summer, I told them to drink water to hydrate because I did not want them getting the extra sugar, the ingredients from pop. Now I know I was poisoning my children.

I can only imagine what that mom feels right now. We have a lot of infrastructure problems around the country, no question. We have colleagues on both sides of the aisle working together on various proposals that I support to deal long term with infrastructure.

But this is way beyond that. This is an entire city of 100,000 people who have poisoned water because of decisions that none of them made. We can talk later about whose fault it is. There is certainly culpability and accountability. But right now we are focused on helping the people who had nothing to do with creating this. It is 100,000 people. The entire system has lead in it. Some levels are thousands of points higher than is acceptable. No lead is acceptable, but some of it is higher than a toxic waste belt.

So we are on the floor asking to help the children of Flint by doing what we do all the time. We just step up as Americans and help a community rebuild their water system. There is a lot more to do. We are so grateful for colleagues who have reached out to say we want to help in a variety of ways--with their education needs, nutrition needs, and health care needs,--but the basic issue is fixing the water system so that the people of Flint have the dignity that we have of knowing that when they turn on the faucet there is going to be clean water.

You have probably seen the picture, but in this example in Time magazine, this is a child whose mom was bathing her children, and there are rashes. We have seen rashes, sores, hair falling out, and lead levels because a community drinking water system has been decimated.

Americans responded across the country by sending bottled water, and people are very grateful for that. But we also know Americans support and join us by saying bottled water is not enough. This baby cannot be bathed in bottled water every day for years and years and years.

I had one citizen say to me: Ma'am, I can't take a shower in bottled water. We have to support fixing the infrastructure. We do that all the time.

So what we have done--and I appreciate the chair of the Energy Committee working with us. She spent a lot of time--as has the ranking member, who has been ferocious in her support, for which we are so grateful--trying to work this out. Originally, we thought we had a path forward. Then there were procedural issues that came up. Yesterday we thought we had another path forward that would give us bipartisan support on a solution that we could get done and passed here. Then that was paused. I am not exactly sure why that happened, but that was paused.

So today we are asking for colleagues to give us some more time. We have very key people in this Chamber who are now stepping up to give us additional ideas on how we could get this fixed. We can do this quickly if there is the will to do that. So we are asking colleagues to give us more time.

As we know, the cloture vote in front of us today is to basically shut off amendments and go to the next step in third reading. What we are saying is give us some time. There are other issues that need to be resolved as well, certainly issues with working men and women around Davis-Bacon laws. There are other issues. We know that we can come to a resolution if there is the political will and a little more time, so that it is not just some bogus proposal. We have had things thrown out that don't solve the problem. We are not looking for something that just gives somebody political cover. We have resisted a lot of folks who would love just to make this a political issue. These children should not be a political football.

I think Members of this body know that Senator Peters and I are people who want to get things done. We work across the aisle every single day. If we wanted to blow this up as a political issue, believe me, there would be a different way to do it, and the story writes itself.

We are asking people to care and see these children like you see your own children. These children, these families have been ignored and not seen. We see them. Their faces are burned in my memory. We are asking colleagues to see them, to hold them with as much value as you would children in your own family and in the States that you represent. That is what we are asking--nothing more, nothing less.

We have not proposed that the Federal Government take full responsibility on cost--far from it. In fact, we have been told by colleagues that we have not proposed enough. We have been willing, in fact, to come to an agreement on something that is less than half of what we originally asked for.

But these children deserve the dignity of knowing we will step up and help them. Too many of these children--9,000 of them under the age of 6 and a whole lot of many more thousands above the age of 6--are going to be set back and not have the opportunity to be all they can be. How many scientists, doctors, business people, and teachers are we going to lose because of lead poisoning in this community?

It doesn't go away. I have learned more than I have ever wanted to know about lead. I didn't know that once it enters the body, it never goes away. So the children who are poisoned are going to have to live with this, and the best we can do is mitigate it through nutrition and through other strategies. But they deserve to know that we are going to fix this, and we can't begin to deal with it unless the water system works. That is all we are asking for.

Today, because we know there is a path, people of good will have been trying to get it done. We need a little more time. I think these children deserve a little more time. I think these families deserve a little more time.

Let us get this together. If we vote next week, next Tuesday, we will be OK. How many kids, how many bottles of water--how many bottles will be used between now and next Tuesday by the people of Flint?

We can take a couple of extra days to do something that will dramatically change the opportunity for our future in a city that is as important as any other city in our country. So that is what we are asking for. We are grateful that our colleagues are standing with us-- our colleagues on our side of the aisle--to give us more time.

We are hoping that the leadership will decide to give us that time so that we can say to this child: We see you, we hear you, we care about you, and we are doing our part in the Senate to make things better.

Thank you.

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Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, I also want to, as I did before, commend those working on this bill, and I share the majority leader's feeling that a lot of positive progress has been made. We are just not done yet. So while I commend, and have commended, the chair and the ranking member, we have important issues and an energy bill that deals with energy, water, and all kinds of issues. Certainly addressing what is happening in Flint, MI, with the catastrophe is appropriate. We just want to know that we have an agreement--not vote, but an agreement--to get this done.

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Ms. STABENOW. I first want to thank the chair. She lists a lot of bipartisan efforts that have gone on. I know a lot of work has been done, but nowhere in that list have the needs of the folks of Flint been addressed, including the children.

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Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, we want to get this solved and not just have votes that go down.

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Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, might I ask the Senator to yield for a question so we can share the information?

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Ms. STABENOW. Will the chair yield for a question?

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Ms. STABENOW. Will the distinguished leader yield for a question? I have been asking for the opportunity to ask a question, and I ask unanimous consent to ask a question.

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Ms. STABENOW. Is the chair aware that the dollars we have asked for require a comprehensive plan from the State and that at this point only $28 million--most going to health--has been allocated to the State?

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Ms. STABENOW. I will be happy to continue the discussion.

I thank the Chair. Cloture Motion

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