05.01.2019

Schumer Floor Remarks On Attorney General Barr’s Mischaracterization Of The Mueller Report, Yesterday’s Meeting On Infrastructure At The White House, And The Need To Confront The Climate Change Crisis

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer today spoke on the Senate floor regarding Attorney General Barr’s mischaracterization of the Mueller report, yesterday’s meeting on infrastructure at the White House, and the need to confront the climate change crisis. Below are his remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Mr. President, as we speak, Attorney General William Barr is testifying before a hearing of the Judiciary Committee.

There may not be a member of this administration with more to answer for than the current Attorney General – and that’s a pretty high bar. His confirmation occurred only a few months ago, and yet in that short time, Mr. Barr’s conduct has raised damning questions about his impartiality and about his fitness.

Just last night, we learned that Special Counsel Mueller sent a private letter more than a month ago to the Attorney General that took issue with Mr. Barr’s early description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions. And I ask unanimous consent that the letter be put in the record.

What a stunning indictment of the Attorney General, whose principal job in all of this was to make sure – to make sure – that he wasn’t mischaracterizing or spinning results.

This letter shows what an awful, awful Attorney General Barr has been so far and I will have more to say on this later.

Now, on infrastructure. Yesterday, Speaker Pelosi and I had a productive meeting with President Trump at the White House on the topic of infrastructure.

We all agreed on the need to invest substantial resources in infrastructure.

We all agreed on the need to modernize and rebuild our roads and bridges, our highways, and also our schools, our housing, and our power grids.

And there was a specific conversation about the need to invest in expanding broadband to underserved communities.

We told the president we needed labor protections, we needed a green bill, and we needed to see that minorities and women and veterans got their fair share when contracts were let out.

It was a good discussion, but there’s more to be decided.

So what we agreed was that we’d have another discussion in which the administration will present proposals for how to pay for the bill. Let’s face it: the reason we haven’t gotten far on infrastructure is the administration has come up with no way to pay for it. We Democrats put together a $1-trillion plan, not $2 trillion. But we paid for all of it. We use tax breaks on the wealthy, powerful – who got huge, huge benefits recently – to pay for it. That may not be the way that president wants to pay for it, but we want to know how he would, because last time he came up with a bill that had virtually no real pay-fors. It relied on public-private partnerships that now even he discredits.

And so the bottom line is simple: we will get an infrastructure bill if the president will come up with pay-fors and then we can put ours forward – we have already – and see if we can come to an agreement. Seven or eight people at the meeting all told the president we will not get a bill done unless he comes up with pay-fors. He agreed. He said, “I will. I’ll take some heat from some of my fellow Republicans, but I’ll do it.” We will be waiting. We will be waiting.

At the White House, I made it explicit that in an effort to pay for infrastructure, the administration must not take the tax code and make it any more regressive than it already is. I prefer to make it more progressive. To tell the wealthy, who are getting a huge tax break, and then to tell the middle class, working people that you’re paying for the bulk of this? Totally unfair. Unacceptable to this member.

So the president said he would come up with pay-fors, but this morning I was disappointed. I saw Acting Chief of Staff, Mr. Mulvaney, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board mocked the effort we are trying to make to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. The criticism? Too much spending. The deficit is too high. We can’t find revenue.

Funny that we didn’t hear any of these same criticisms when the Republicans in Congress were jamming through a partisan, unpaid-for, two-trillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthiest of Americans. That doesn’t have to be paid for, but our roads and bridges do. We’re willing to pay for both – although we’re not willing to pay for any big tax cuts on the wealthy. That didn’t pass with a single Democratic vote. But I hope, for the good of the country, for the need of infrastructure – we know when we build infrastructure that America grows, jobs are created. So we hope that Mr. Mulvaney and the Wall Street Journal editorial board will re-think their knee jerk, partisan reactions.

Let’s face it. Mr. Mulvaney is different. He was with the president, he supported the tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal editorial page believes it’s okay to increase the deficit to reduce taxes on the wealthy, but not okay when you’re building infrastructure. Ninety percent – 95 percent of all Americans don’t agree with that. Let’s hope President Trump doesn’t follow their ministrations.

Bottom line: we hope to hear from the White House in several weeks, one way or the other. Mr. President, what are your pay-fors? We want to know. The American people want to know. And it is the biggest barrier right now to preventing us from getting an infrastructure bill.

Finally, Mr. President, on climate change. Over the past few months, I have been asking Leader McConnell and my Republican colleagues three simple questions on climate: do they agree that climate change is real? Do they believe it’s caused by humans? And do they believe that we should take significant action?

It seems that after repeating those questions over and over again, we’ve finally gotten some results.

Yesterday, the New York Times had an article and it said that some Senate Republicans, “in a switch,” are starting to cite climate change as the reason for some their policy suggestions, be they support for nuclear energy or carbon capture research.

Well that’s a first. The fact that we’ve been asking our Republican colleagues questions – do you believe in climate change? And the fact now that they feel compelled to say yes – even though we don’t agree with their solutions, which we may not – is progress. Not enough progress given that the globe is at stake, but at least it’s a step forward. And we haven’t seen any steps come out of our Republican friends in a long time.

So hopefully, our Republican friends are finally coming around to realize that climate change is real and caused by humans. Maybe they’re looking at poll numbers and realizing that calling climate change a hoax is as crazy as it sounds. Maybe they’re seeing the changes in their own states with climate. Whatever the reason, it’s at least a little bit of progress. And we’ll have to take whatever little bit we can get from our normally intransigent Republican friends on this issue and we welcome it.

Now that said, the types of policies my Republican colleagues talk about when they talk about climate change do a disservice to the term “low-hanging fruit.”

Of course, I welcome smart, sensible solutions from anywhere in this chamber—but there’s a difference between getting serious on climate change and just mouthing the words or coming up with solutions that don’t really solve the problem. Some of my colleagues have called for funding for more research on carbon capture—and that’s a great idea, it should be part of any plan.

But in the face of the existential threat of our time, if they support carbon capture but don’t go bigger, don’t advocate more solutions than that, they’re not doing close to enough of what we need. We must go bolder, and we must grapple with the central challenge – reducing carbon emissions as quickly as possible. The good news is, we can do that with affordable and reliable technologies that exist today.

We have waited far too long to address the climate crisis in a serious way. We now need to act in a way that matches the urgency and scale of this challenge. My Republican colleagues on the other side of the aisle mock the Green New Deal, but the growing youth movement leading the fight for the Green New Deal understand something that I think most Americans do – we must think big, bold and fast, and that we can create jobs and economic opportunity for working families in this transition to a clean energy economy.

So the little bit of the glimmer, the little, small green sprouts of progress. We welcome whatever we can get.

Our Republican friends are starting to answer our pointed questions on climate change; but now the next step is they need to think bigger, and talk to the Leader about pursuing real legislation instead of just partisan stunts.

I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

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