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Sen. Bill Nelson

Senate passes VA reform bill

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The Senate today approved legislation to reform the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and make it easier for the Secretary of the VA to fire poorly-performing employees.
The legislation – sponsored by U.S. Sens. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) – is aimed at improving the quality of care veterans receive at the VA by holding VA employees more accountable. The bill also creates new protections for VA whistleblowers and ensures that employees who are terminated have an adequate opportunity to appeal their dismissal.
“The brave men and women who have served our country deserve the very best care our nation can give them,” Nelson said on the Senate floor prior to the vote. “This bipartisan bill will help improve the quality of care our veterans receive by reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
For years, the VA has been plagued by reports of inefficiency and long wait times. The legislation approved today would, among other things:

  • Authorize the secretary to fire, suspend, reassign or demote senior executives if the secretary determines that their misconduct or performance warrants such an action.
  • Authorize the secretary to fire, demote or suspend non-senior executives without pay.
  • Ensure employees have an adequate opportunity to appeal their termination.
  • Protect whistleblowers from retaliation by not allowing the secretary to use this authority to fire employees who have filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel.
  • Establish an Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection for employees to bring to light major problems at the VA without losing their job or facing retaliation.
  • Allow the secretary to rescind an employee’s bonus if the secretary deems it appropriate.
  • Allow the secretary to reduce a senior executive’s retirement pension if they are convicted of a felony related to their work at the VA.

The legislation, approved today by a voice vote in the Senate, now heads to the House for consideration.
Following is a rush transcript and here’s a link to watch video of Nelson’s remarks on the Senate floor prior to the vote.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson
Remarks on the Senate Floor
June 6, 2017
Sen. Nelson: Mr. President, it’s fitting today, June the 6th, the anniversaries of D-Day in Europe and the Battle of Midway in the Pacific that this is a time we are talking about our country’s veterans in the debate that’s going on in the Senate.
The brave men and women who have served our country deserve the very best care our nation can give them. That’s why I rise today in support of the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act which I am given to believe later this afternoon will pass by a voice vote here in the Senate.
This bipartisan bill will help improve the quality of care our veterans receive by reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs and making it easier for the secretary of the VA to fire poorly performing employees. The legislation will allow the VA to hold its employees more accountable. It also creates new protections for whistleblowers, those who report wrongdoing, and it would ensure that any employee who is terminated has an adequate opportunity to appeal their dismissal. For years the VA has been plagued by reports of inefficiency and long wait times.
And I might say that those reports, often we find are true, but that is completely separate from the quality of medical care that is given through the VA health care system. You talk to almost any veteran and they are very pleased at the quality of that medical care. It’s the administrative stuff getting in the way, and that’s what there’s been such an outrage about.
Well, this VA bill is going to help the VA get rid of the bad actors while protecting the good ones. I want to make it clear that the vast majority of VA employees perform their work admirably in an often thankless environment.
These dedicated public servants work hard to provide the day-to-day care that our veterans deserve and they should be protected.
And that’s why I — while I believe that it’s important to hold poorly performing employees accountable, I also believe that it’s important to protect the rights of the employees who may have been wrongly terminated, especially at the lower levels, by giving them the opportunity to appeal a supervisor’s decision to fire them. And this bill that we’re going to pass does that. It is supported by dozens of veteran service organizations, the office of special counsel, and the secretary himself. And so I urge our colleagues to join me and join so many of us in voting in favor of the bill.
And I would also say that on this very famous day, this anniversary, June the 6th, where I have been to the beaches of Normandy, I’ve been to Omaha beach.
As a matter of fact, while there it’s impossible to walk into that cemetery on the cliff overlooking the beach. It’s impossible to walk into that beautiful, beautiful American cemetery and not become very, very emotional realizing what happened in 1944.
I felt so strongly about this that at one point I wanted to get on my jogging shoes and run the four miles of that Omaha beach. It was something that I just wanted to reach back into time of having been there where so many sacrificed so much. And then, of course, the Battle of Midway, the time at which it turned the battle in the Pacific where a young admiral showed his courage and his superiority in planning, and as a result of that battle, turned around the course of the war in the Pacific with Japan.
So what a day to remember, June the 6th.
Mr. President, thank you and I yield the floor.

Senators file bill to help hospitals train more doctors

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To help alleviate a growing doctor shortage here in the U.S., a bipartisan group of senators today introduced legislation to make it easier for more hospitals to start full-time residency programs needed to train new physicians.
The legislation filed by U.S. Sens. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) would fix a glitch in Medicare’s Graduate Medical Education rule that prevents hospitals that have previously accepted part-time medical residents from establishing their own full-time, Medicare-supported residency programs.
The rule has led some hospitals to refuse part-time residents altogether out of concern that accepting them would prevent that hospital from establishing its own full-time program in the future.
“The U.S. needs more doctors,” Nelson said. “This bill makes it easier for hospitals to offer full-time residency programs to train the next generation of physicians needed to meet our country’s growing demand.”
“We need to help our hospitals in Wisconsin provide better residency opportunities to train our future physicians well,” Johnson said. “These men and women will be the next generation of doctors – many of whom will hopefully remain in Wisconsin to serve our families and communities.”
The United States will have a shortage of 34,600 to 88,000 physicians by 2025, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, and up to 104,900 physicians by 2030.
If approved, the lawmakers’ bill would allow at least 11 hospitals in the U.S. to begin taking steps to open new medical residency programs, including one in Florida: Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Lakeland.
The bill now heads to the Senate Finance Committee for consideration.
Here’s a link to the text of the bill.

Sen. Bill Nelson's remarks on White House plan to privatize air traffic control

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U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee which oversees the FAA, took to the Senate floor this evening to slam the administration’s proposal to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system:
“So let’s hand over to the airlines all the people and the equipment essential to the safe operation of our nation’s air traffic control system and trust them, the airlines, to manage our skies,” Nelson said. “We know that several airlines in the past year have had to cancel thousands of flights and strand passengers at airports for hours because they couldn’t effectively manage their IT systems. How can we trust the airlines to govern an entity that manages our skies, when it can’t even manage its own basic IT systems?”
Below is a rush transcript and here’s a link to watch video of Nelson’s remarks.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson
Remarks on the Senate Floor
June 5, 2017
Sen. Nelson: Mr. President, I want to talk about a subject that is near and dear to the presiding officer’s heart as well as to this senator because we both have the privilege of serving on the Senate Commerce Committee — Commerce, Science and Transportation.
Mr. President, Congress finds itself facing a year of deadlines and the two most talked about ones are the debt ceiling and the continued funding for the government. But if that were not enough, a very important deadline is looming that affects the safety of the traveling public. By the end of September, Congress must reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration or risk the shutdown of the agency’s core safety mission. This senator has the privilege of being the ranking member of the Commerce Committee and I have the privilege of working with the chairman, Senator Thune, on a comprehensive and long term FAA reauthorization bill. Unfortunately what prevented the long-term bill from passing Congress last year, it’s threatening to do the same again this year all over.
This morning the White House formally announced its intention to privatize air traffic control, that function of the FAA, a move that the White House claims will be self-sustaining.
This so-called plan for ATC privatization includes an entity that will be run, in large part, by, you guessed it, the major airlines. And that entity would receive, free of charge, government owned FAA assets and that entity would collect user fees to finance its operations.
Well, this is how many of us interpret this proposal: so, let’s hand over to the airlines all the people and the equipment essential to the safe operation of our nation’s air traffic control system and trust them, the airlines, to manage our skies and the increasing air traffic.
And on top of that, here on the other side — on top of that — well, let’s finance the airlines’ control of our sky through user fees paid by the general aviation community.
We know that several airlines in the past year have had to cancel thousands of flights and strand passengers at airports for hours because they couldn’t effectively manage their IT systems. How can we trust airlines to govern an entity that manages our skies when it can’t even manage its own basic IT systems?
The FAA, our government Federal Aviation Administration, safely and effectively manages the largest and most complex airspace in the world. Supporters of air traffic control privatization can cite other countries all they want to that have privatized, but none of those privatized systems hold a candle to the complicated air traffic and densely populated air traffic system that the FAA has accomplished.
Rather than helping the FAA continue its progress toward modernizing our air traffic control system through NextGen, that is being implemented as we speak and in three years the process of handing off most of the air traffic to the satellites instead of ground-based radar — that’s just in three years — the transition, on the other hand, to a privatized air traffic control entity is only going to disrupt and delay the FAA’s modernization efforts.
So one has to ask, if it isn’t broken, what exactly is it that the administration trying to fix? We actually have real issues that need to be addressed in this FAA bill: how to continually, safely integrate drones into our nation’s airspace. Another one: reforming the process for aircraft certification. And, very importantly, helping the FAA hire more air traffic controllers. And we need to work to ensure that consumers — consumers, the flying public — have real protections in place that protect them when things go wrong. I really wish the administration would focus on those issues, which receive near unanimous support in the Senate last year, rather than try and upend the world’s safest air traffic control system.
So let’s not get sidetracked by proposals that have near the bipartisan consensus in Congress nor agreement among aviation stakeholders.
Mr. President, we came very close last year to enacting a bipartisan and comprehensive FAA bill. It passed the Senate by 95-3. All of that, it didn’t have air traffic control privatization.
I know we can do it again, and I look forward to working with Senator Thune and the members of the committee who will have the first crack at this when we bring up the FAA bill. And hopefully we can go with a consensus bill that will give us an authorization for the FAA many years — five to seven years in the future, so we can have the certainty of the authorization with which to continue to build a safe airline and air safety record and implement the next generation of air traffic control.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Sen. Bill Nelson statement on withdrawing from Paris agreement

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Following is a statement from U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) on the president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement:
“This is a huge mistake. Sea-level rise caused by the Earth heating up is a real threat to Florida. If the U.S. isn’t going to do its part to combat climate change, then the rest of the world won’t do theirs and millions of Floridians living along the coast will be at risk.”

Nelson introduces bill to speed up Everglades projects

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Florida lawmakers in both the U.S. House and Senate reintroduced legislation today to expedite future Everglades-restoration projects by streamlining the process from planning to construction of a project.
The legislation – introduced in the Senate by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) – would automatically authorize the Army Corps of Engineers to move forward on any Everglades-restoration project that is ready to begin, without having to wait for additional approval from Congress.
“Restoring the Everglades is a top priority,” Nelson said. “There’s simply too much at stake here in Florida to wait around for Congress to pass a water bill every few years. This bill will allow the Corps to begin work on these projects as soon as they are ready.”
Under the current system, the Corps must inform Congress once they are ready to begin work on a project, and then wait for Congress to authorize that project in a broader water resources bill.
Between 2001 and 2016, Congress only passed three water resources bills, delaying several Everglades projects for years. The $1.9 billion Central Everglades Planning Project, for example, was deemed shovel-ready in Dec. 2014, but wasn’t authorized by Congress until Dec. 2016.
Three Everglades-restoration projects are currently in the planning stage: the Lake Okeechobee Watershed Project, the Western Everglades Project, and the Loxahatchee River Watershed Restoration Project.
If Nelson’s bill is approved, construction on these three projects could begin as soon as the Corps deems them ready – instead of waiting years for Congress to authorize them in a future water bill.
Text of Nelson’s bill is available here.

Nelson vows to fight Trump order on oil drilling

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Sen. Bill Nelson took to the Senate floor today vowing to fight any attempt by the administration to open up additional areas around Florida to offshore oil drilling.
“Drilling off of Florida’s neighboring states poses a real threat to our state’s environment and our multibillion-dollar tourism industry,” Nelson said. “That’s because a spill off the coast of Louisiana can end up on the beaches of Northwest Florida just like a spill off the coast of Virginia or South Carolina can affect the entire Atlantic coast.”
Nelson’s remarks come as the president is expected to sign an executive order Friday expanding offshore oil drilling.
“This announcement by the president will be like a big present for the oil companies,” Nelson said. “I hope the president thinks twice before putting Florida’s economy at such a risk. I hope he refrains from issuing this executive order, but if he doesn’t, this senator and a bipartisan delegation from Florida will fight this order.”
Below is a rush transcript of Nelson’s remarks, and here’s a link to watch video of his speech: https://youtu.be/EXb5ubQrxVE.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson
Remarks on the Senate Floor
April 26, 2017
Sen. Nelson: Mr. President, I want to address the senate on the occasion of the solemn memorial of seven years since the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the resulting oil spill and the tragedy of killing a number of workers.
It was 11 men were killed. It fouled the sensitive Gulf ecosystem in ways that we still do not fully realize, and yet we are hearing today that the president is expected to issue an executive order that ignores the implications of that tragedy which was also the largest environmental disaster in US history by this new executive order blindly encouraging more drilling in very sensitive areas.
Mr. President, I can tell you that drilling off of Florida’s neighboring states poses a real threat to our state’s environment and our multibillion-dollar tourism industry, and that’s because a spill off the coast of Louisiana can end up on the beaches of northwest Florida just like a spill off the coast of Virginia or South Carolina can affect the entire Atlantic coast.
BP, as a result of the Deepwater Horizon, agreed to pay more than $20 billion in penalties to clean up the 2010 oil spill and repay Gulf residents for lost revenue.
But apparently that wasn’t enough if BP’s recent spill in Alaska is any other indication.
So we shouldn’t be surprised since oil companies and their friends have fought against any new safety standards or requirements. And still the president wants to open up additional waters to drilling despite the fact that we haven’t applied lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon.
It is certainly at a time when the United States has been able to find all new reserves of oil and gas onshore. So we are not in a time of shortage of discovery and reserves of oil, and especially what is being affected, our domestic energy market with the low price of natural gas since so much of it and the reserves are just tremendous here in the continental US.
The most visible change since the deep water horizon, the division of the Minerals and Management Service into the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, all of those changes made as a result to try to improve things after the BP spill, it doesn’t seem to have made any major improvements in oversight, and that’s according to a report issued by the GAO this last month.
So I’ve come to the floor to try to alert other senators about the importance of preserving the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It makes no sense to put Florida’s multibillion-dollar tourism-driven economy at risk.
And there’s something else at risk. The department of defense has stated numerous times — I have two letters from two Republicans, secretaries of defense, that says that drilling and oil related activities are incompatible with our military training and weapons testing. That is the area known as the Gulf training range. It’s the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida. It is the largest testing and training range for the United States military in the world.
Now in that Gulf training range is where the pilots for the F-22 are trained. That’s at Tyndall Air Force base. And it’s where the new F-35, the pilots are trained, by the way, not only for the United States, but also for many foreign nations that their countries have bought the f-35.
Of course that’s essential to our national security. And that’s just pilot training. That doesn’t speak of the testing over hundreds and hundreds of miles because it is restricted airspace of some of our most sophisticated weapons.
And, oh, by the way, when the US Navy Atlantic fleet shut down on our training in Puerto Rico and the island of Vieques, where do you think that a lot of that training came to? The navy still has to train, so they’ll send their squadrons down to Key West naval air station at Boca Chicas Key, and when those pilots and their F-18 Hornets lift off the runway within two minutes they’re out over the Gulf of Mexico in restricted airspace, so they don’t spend a lot of fuel and a lot of time to get there. And so that’s why a lot of our colleagues across the state of Florida, across the aisle — in other words, this is bipartisan — have weighed in with this administration urging continued protection for the largest military testing and training area in the world. Opposition to drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico is bipartisan. It’s the Senate and House — bipartisan. But so is our opposition to drilling off the Atlantic coast.
Now let me just distinguish between the two. Years ago, my then-republican colleague, Senator Mel Martinez, and I both authored in law an exemption until the year 2022 of any oil drilling off of the coast of Florida. It’s actually everything east of what is called the Military Mission Line, and it’s virtually the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida. And of course we did that for the reasons that I’ve already stated that’s in law up until 2022.
But the administration will be coming forth with another plan for the five-year period for oil drilling offshore for the years 2023 up through 2028. It is my hope that the words of this senator and the words of our bipartisan colleagues from the Florida delegation will convince the administration that it’s not wise to impede the military’s unnecessary training and testing area, not even to speak of the tremendous economic deprivation that will come as a result of an oil spill.
And just think back to the BP spill. Think back to the time when the beaches, the sugary white sands of Pensacola Beach, they, in fact, were completely covered with oil. That picture, a very notable picture, a contrast of the black oil on top of the white sand, that picture went around the world. The winds started blowing — this is the oil from the BP off Louisiana. The wind started to continue to blow it to the east. And so some of the oil got in Pensacola Bay. Some of the oil started to get into Choctawhatchee Bay. Some got on the beautiful beaches of Destin and Fort Walton Beach. The winds took it as far east as the Panama City beaches. There they received basically tar balls on the beach.
And then the winds reversed and started taking it back to the west. So none of the other beaches all the way down the coast of Florida, Clearwater, St. Petersburg on down to the beaches off Bradenton and off of Sarasota and Fort Myers and Naples and all the way down to Marco Island, none of those beaches received the oil because the wind didn’t keep blowing it that way.
But the entire west coast of Florida lost an entire tourist season because our guests, our visitors, the tourists, they didn’t come because they had seen those pictures. And they thought that oil was on all of our beaches.
Let me tell you how risky that had been. There is in the Gulf of Mexico something known as the loop current. It comes through the separation of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and the western end of Cuba. It goes up into the gulf and then it loops and comes south in the gulf. It hugs the Florida Keys. It becomes the Gulf Stream that hugs the east coast of Florida and about mid down the peninsula it starts to leave the coast, follows and parallels the east coast of the United States and eventually goes to northern Europe. That’s the Gulf Stream. Had that oil spill been blown south from Louisiana and the loop current had come enough north, that oil spill would have gotten in the loop current and it would have taken it down past the very fragile coral reefs of the Florida keys and right up the beaches of southeast Florida, a huge tourism business. And by the way, the Gulf Stream hugs the coast in some cases only a mile off of the beach.
Now, that’s the hard economic reality of what could happen to Florida’s tourism industry, not only on the west coast that it already did that season of the BP oil spill but what could happen on the east coast of Florida, too. So opposition to drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico is certainly bipartisan, but also is the opposition to drilling off of the Atlantic coast.
In the last Congress, members from both parties joined together to file a House companion to the legislation that this senator had filed that would prohibit seismic testing in the Atlantic off of Florida. The type of seismic air gun testing that companies wanted to use to search for oil and gas would threaten thousands of marine mammals and fish, including endangered species like the North American Right Whale.
The blast from seismic air guns can cause permanent hearing loss for whales and for dolphins which disrupts their feeding, calving, and their breeding. And in addition to the environmental damage that those surveys would cause, businesses up and down the Atlantic coast would also suffer from drilling activity.
Over 35,000 businesses and over 500,000 commercial fishing families have registered their opposition to o offshore drilling in the Atlantic. From fishermen to hotel owners to restaurateurs, coastal residents, and business owners understand it’s just too dangerous to risk the environment and economy that they depend on.
There is one unique industry off shore in the Florida east coast, and this was, we made the case, way back in the 1980’s when a secretary of the interior named James Watt decided that he was going to drill all the way from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, all the way south to Fort Pierce, Florida. This senator was a young congressman then and took this case on and what finally convinced the Appropriations Committee not to include any funds for the execution of, an offering of those leases was the simple fact that where we are launching our space shuttle then as well as our military rockets from Cape Canaveral, that you simply can’t have oil rigs out there and be dropping the first stages and the solid rocket boosters from the space shuttle.
Now as you know, the cape has come alive with activity, a love commercial rocketry as well as the mainstays for our military space program. And in a year and a half, NASA will launch the largest rocket ever, one-third more powerful than the Saturn V which was the rocket that took us to the moon. And that’s the beginning of the Mars program as we are going to Mars with humans. And so because of that space industry, whether it’s commercial or whether it’s civilian, NASA or whether it’s military, you simply can’t have oil rigs out there in the Atlantic where we are dropping the first stages of those rockets. This is common sense.
So when President Obama took the Atlantic coast off the table in 2017 to 2022, that five-year planning period in that offshore drilling plan, Floridians finally breathed a sigh of relief and they sighed, too, happily. If President Trump intends to open these areas up to drilling, his administration can receive and expect to receive a flood of opposition from the folks who knows what’s going to happen.
So it is this week, and here we are mid-week, it is this week that we’re expecting for the Trump administration to move forward with an executive order that would ignore the wishes of coastal communities.
Now, I want to say that the areas off of Florida in the east coast of the Atlantic are very sensitive, as I have just outlined. But there’s nothing to say that if you have a spill off of Georgia or South Carolina, that it can’t move south. And that starts the problem all over.
This announcement by the president will be like a big present for the oil companies who, by the way, in areas in the Gulf of Mexico that are rich with oil and there are in fact active leases, they’re not producing the oil. So why would you want to grant more leases in areas that is so important to preserve the nation’s economy as well as our military preparedness.
I hope the president thinks twice before putting Florida’s economy at such a risk. I hope he refrains from issuing this executive order, but if he doesn’t, this senator and a bipartisan delegation from Florida will fight this order.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Hurricane Hunter backup bill passes Senate

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The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill late Wednesday requiring the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to have reliable backups available for its Hurricane Hunter aircraft.
The provision, sought by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), comes in the wake of an incident last year when one of the jets NOAA was using to gather hurricane measurements was forced to land for emergency repairs during Hurricane Hermine. The Gulfstream G-IV was grounded for several days, forcing NOAA to scramble to find a temporary replacement.
“When it comes to protecting lives and property, we can’t afford to go without Hurricane Hunters,” Nelson said following the passage of the measure. “We need to have a backup plan in place, and I’m hopeful we’ll have one in time for hurricane season.”
NOAA maintains a fleet of three aircraft currently based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The planes are designed to fly in and around hurricanes and tropical storms, collecting data used to track and measure the intensity of these powerful storms.
NOAA’s current fleet of Hurricane Hunters include two P3 propeller aircraft, known as Miss Piggy and Kermit, that fly into storms, but only one Gulfstream jet, known as Gonzo, capable of reaching altitudes high enough to fly above storms.
The measurements taken by Hurricane Hunters are essential to weather forecasters. On May 1, the Hurricane Hunter fleet is slated to move from Tampa to the Lakeland-Linder Regional Airport.
Nelson’s Hurricane Hunter provision was included in a broader weather bill (HR 353). The legislation now goes to the House for consideration.

Nelson, others seek to block Trump's executive order

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One day after President Trump signed an executive order to roll back many of the Obama administration’s policies aimed at combating climate change, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and others filed legislation to nullify the order.   

“Florida is ground zero when it comes to the effects of sea-level rise and climate change,” Nelson said today. “Rolling back these policies puts Florida’s economy and environment at risk – and it’s a risk Floridians shouldn’t have to take.” 

The legislation would block federal agencies from implementing the actions outlined in an executive order Trump signed Tuesday instructing the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies to begin undoing several initiatives aimed at limiting harmful emissions from power plants. 

In addition to Nelson, the bill is cosponsored by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Tom Carper (D-DE), Chris Coons (D-DE), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Al Franken (D-MN), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Ed Markey (D-MA), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jack Reed (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Tom Udall (D-NM), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

Text of the bill can be found here, and below is a background story on the president’s executive action.

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Trump Signs Executive Order Unwinding Obama Climate Policies 

By CORAL DAVENPORT
Published: March 28, 2017

President Trump signed on Tuesday a much-anticipated executive order intended to roll back most of President Barack Obama’s climate-change legacy, celebrating the move as a way to promote energy independence and to restore thousands of lost coal industry jobs.
Flanked by coal miners at a ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Trump signed a short document titled the “Energy Independence” executive order, directing the agency to start the legal process of withdrawing and rewriting the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s policies to fight global warming.
The order also takes aim at a suite of narrower but significant Obama-era climate and environmental policies, including lifting a short-term ban on new coal mining on public lands.
The executive order does not address the United States’ participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement, the landmark accord that committed nearly every country to take steps to reduce climate-altering pollution. But experts note that if the Trump program is enacted, it will all but ensure that the United States cannot meet its clean air commitments under the accord.
But energy economists say the order falls short of both of those goals — in part because the United States already largely relies on domestic sources for the coal and natural gas that fires most of the nation’s power plants.
“We don’t import coal,” said Robert N. Stavins, an energy economist at Harvard University. “So in terms of the Clean Power Plan, this has nothing to do with so-called energy independence whatsoever.”
Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, said in an interview on ABC News on Sunday that the order will help the United States “be both pro-jobs and pro-environment.”
But coal miners should not assume their jobs will return if Trump’s regulations take effect.
The new order would mean that older coal plants that had been marked for closing would probably stay open for a few years longer, extending the demand for coal, said Robert W. Godby, an energy economist at the University of Wyoming.
But even so, “the mines that are staying open are using more mechanization,” he said.
“They’re not hiring people,” he continued.
“So even if we saw an increase in coal production, we could see a decrease in coal jobs,” he added.
Legal experts say it could take years for the Trump administration to unwind the Clean Power Plan, which has not yet been carried out because it has been temporarily frozen by a Supreme Court order. Those regulations sought to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants. If enacted, they would have shut down hundreds of those plants, frozen construction of future plants and replaced them with wind and solar farms and other renewable energy sources.
Throughout his campaign, Mr. Trump highlighted his support of coal miners, holding multiple rallies in coal country and vowing to restore lost jobs to the flagging industry. At a rally last week in Kentucky, Mr. Trump vowed that his executive order would “save our wonderful coal miners from continuing to be put out of work.”
While coal mining jobs have dropped in the United States, they do not represent a significant portion of the American economy. Coal companies employed about 65,971 miners in 2015, down from 87,755 in 2008, according to Energy Department statistics.
And though the percentage of coal mining jobs dropped sharply, economists said that was not driven by the Clean Power Plan. Rather, they blamed two key forces: an increase in the production of natural gas, which is a cheaper, cleaner-burning alternative to coal, and an increase in automation, which allowed coal companies to produce more fuel with fewer employees. The rollback of Mr. Obama’s regulations will not change either of those forces, economists say.
“The problem with coal jobs has not been CO2 regulations, so this will probably not bring back coal jobs,” Mr. Godby said. “The problem has been that there has not been market demand for coal.”
The coal industry nonetheless cheered the move.
“These actions are vital to the American coal industry, to our survival, and to getting some of our coal families back to work,” said Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of Murray Energy, one of the nation’s largest coal mining companies.
But even Mr. Murray conceded that he did not expect Mr. Trump’s order to return coal mining numbers to their former strength. “I really don’t know how far the coal industry can be brought back,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s directive also eliminates about a half-dozen of Mr. Obama’s smaller executive orders and memorandums related to combating climate change.
For example, the order would require White House economists to recalculate a budgeting metric known as the social cost of carbon that, under the Obama administration, limited pollution by arguing that global warming outweighed economic benefits for industries. It would also eliminate a requirement that federal agencies consider the impact on climate change when analyzing all future environmental permits.
Combined, the measures are likely to ensure the United States’ emissions of planet-warming pollution remain too high to meet the terms of the Paris climate accord.
The aim of the Paris deal is to reduce emissions enough to stave off a warming of the planet by more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the level at which, experts say, the Earth will be irrevocably locked into a future of extreme droughts, flooding and shortages of food and water.
But analysts say Mr. Trump’s order signals that the United States will not meet its pledges under the Paris deal to cut its emissions about 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.
“Meeting the U.S. terms of the Paris Agreement would require full enforcement of the current regulations, plus additional regulations,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “It takes a comprehensive effort involving every country doing what they committed to and more.”
He said Mr. Trump’s order “sends a signal to other countries that they might not have to meet their commitments — which would mean that the world would fail to stay out of the climate danger zone.”

Florida Why Courts Matter coalition statement on Bill Nelson’s opposition to Neil Gorsuch

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fl why courts matter fwcmc

Statement from Progress Florida Executive Director Mark
Ferrulo on behalf of the Florida Why Courts Matter Coalition:

“Having a common-sense, often bi-partisan senator like Bill Nelson come out against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee sends a clear signal about just how out of step Neil Gorsuch is with mainstream American values.
“We agree wholeheartedly with Sen. Nelson that Judge Gorsuch’s track record on voting rights, the corrosive influence of money in elections and siding with corporations over hardworking Americans should disqualify him from sitting on the highest court in the land.
“Every Floridian who works for a living and values their fundamental rights — including the right to vote — owes a debt of gratitude to Bill Nelson for taking this stand.”
 
For more information visit www.WhyCourtsMatter.org/Florida.

Sen. Bill Nelson announces he will vote "no" on Gorsuch

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U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) announced today that he will vote “no” on Judge Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
“Deciding whether to confirm a president’s nominee for the highest court in the land is a responsibility I take very seriously,” Nelson said. “Over the past few weeks, I have met with Judge Gorsuch, listened to the Judiciary Committee’s hearings and reviewed his record with an open mind. I have real concerns with his thinking on protecting the right to vote and allowing unlimited money in political campaigns. In addition, the judge has consistently sided with corporations over employees, as in the case of a freezing truck driver who, contrary to common sense, Judge Gorsuch would have allowed to be fired for abandoning his disabled rig during extreme weather conditions.
“I will vote no on the motion to invoke cloture and, if that succeeds, I will vote no on his confirmation.”