Jennifer Granholm Quotes

Our Great Lakes, harbors, ports, and rivers provide not only vital resources for us to live, but an entire maritime way of life for so many people. The least we can do is protect it, and the way of life it provides for so many.

Obama has offered no solutions; his Democratic majority in the Senate has failed to produce a budget in 1,200 days; and they have both obstructed the Republicans' proposed remedies.

The frustration of the Senate is that it's slow. It looks like an aquarium.

[Describing Congress:] We generally lounge or squabble the greater part of the session, and crowd into a few days of the last of the term three or four times the business done during as many preceding months.

Woe betide a bill that is opposed! It is laid aside for further time, and that never comes.

The Republicans in my state are expressing impatience and disappointment that so little progress has been made during the last eight months in calling to the support of the Administration men loyal to it and in full sympathy with it.

The Republican senators are filibustering themselves out of their seats.

In the United States Senate we have to break the culture of procrastination.

Congress is almost totally dysfunctional right now. All we've done this year and my first year in the Senate ... is barely keep the doors open.

In our political system it’s easier to block action than to act.

Protecting our Great Lakes and conserving this resource for the next generation is critical both for surrounding communities and our planet as a whole.

I've had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress.

The conventional wisdom in an election year is that nothing will get done until after the election.

There's a lot of good, bipartisan legislation that passes in committee and then gets bottled up. As a businessman, it surprised me.

There are occasions when obstruction in Parliament brings greater benefits to the country.

I hear people who are worried about climate change tell me, oh, Congress that's gridlock, that's not where the action is.

We must not risk defunding environmental conservation programs, which is why Congress should reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund to preserve our natural resources.

The Fishable Waters Act shares the same intent of the Clean Water Act by proposing to fulfill goals that have not yet been met to restore and maintain the biological integrity of the nation's waters. The intent of the bill is to enhance the Clean Water Act instead of undercutting it.

We forced Richard Nixon and the Congress who established, and thanks to your leadership, we supported you and we got the Environmental Protection Act and Agency.

It is fashionable nowadays to talk about the endless riches of the sea. The ocean is regarded as a sort of bargain basement, but I don't agree with that estimate. People don't realize that water in the liquid state is very rare in the universe. Away from earth it is usually a gas. This moisture is a blessed treasure, and it is our basic duty, if we don't want to commit suicide, to preserve it.

Conservation and rural-life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at the bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily given for the future.

The Congress talks and talks and talks and talks, but doesn't act. I'm going to continue to work with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to bring about comprehensive immigration reform.

I believe in strong legislation for the environment. So the only question is being smart enough and educated enough to scrutinize the people who are writing the legislation, because there are plenty of ulterior motives out there.

We try it practically every time it comes up, be it amnesty, be it any other issue they want. We try and it gets us nowhere, and it doesn't get us any favors among left-wing-inclined voters, either.

House Republican leaders voted more than 300 times to undermine environmental safeguards since 2011, but almost none of these measures became law because Americans pushed back.