I am a big fan of Canada. They are our neighbor, but if we are going to be adding Canada as a 51st State to help us with our minerals and access to m… - Lisa Murkowski

After years of lagging behind, the United States has come to a better place on energy in recent years. We have seen domestic production rising. We have seen our emissions falling. We have created jobs. We have generated revenues. We have changed the world geopolitically even as we have lessened our impact on the climate. But these kinds of gains can't be taken for granted. They can't be actively ignored. They certainly should not be discarded. We have to acknowledge that this energy renewal has not been even across the country. It has taken place largely on State and private lands. We have very limited private land in Alaska. And instate activity--we have been proudly producing for a while. But we also have, again, much land that is federally held, and we have only seen help arrive with any kind of activity and production on Federal land in the past few years. I would suggest that we cannot afford that forward progress to be reversed, but unfortunately that is the way it feels right now. The threat is that this administration is going to take an approach that is going to take us backwards.

I've come to the floor this evening to share my thoughts on what has been an extraordinarily long, difficult, and truly painful process. As we took up the cloture motion on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court, the process that led us to this vote today has been, in my view, a horrible process. A gut-wrenching process, where good people have been needlessly hurt. Where a woman who never sought the public spotlight, was, I think, cruelly thrust into the brightest of spotlights. A good man, a good man, with sterling academic credentials and unblemished professional record, both as the lawyer, the professional lawyer he was, and judge, and also as a husband and father of two young girls, has been damaged terribly. And as both of these individuals, Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh, have been harmed—their families have too. We need to, we must do better by them. We must do better as a Legislative Branch. We have a moral obligation to do better than this.

When President Biden released the first part of his infrastructure proposal, focusing on international domestic supply chains, he has one section there about electric vehicles. In the White House fact sheet, it says the plan "will enable automakers to spur domestic supply chains from raw materials to parts, retool factories to compete globally, and support American workers to make batteries and EVs." This is the type of policy that we should all want to get behind, broadened out to every industry, not just to a select few. But the question here, though, is whether the administration is willing to accept what is going to be necessary in order to achieve this goal to have these secure supply chains, especially when it comes to expanding our domestic supply of raw materials. It is going to require approval of mining projects, and that has been a challenge for us. That has been a challenge for us.