I support workplace clean air. But a federal ban on smoking would mean that you couldn't smoke in your own home. I don't care what people do in their home.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was opposed to the government mandating that restaurants not allow people to smoke, believing it becomes the customer's choice whether they go in or not. But then, I thought, 'What about the employees? Aren't they hostage to a smoking environment, even if they don't smoke?'
We look back at the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, where people screamed and hollered it's going to be too expensive, they couldn't afford it, and it wouldn't work. And it worked. It worked faster than people expected, at much less cost.
Everyone wants clean air and clean water, but my hope is that we will not regulate it to the point where we drive businesses and industries out of this country, to the point where entrepreneurs cannot start or expand their businesses because they simply can't afford to do so.
Most human beings have enough sense to know that if they work in a city that has a serious smog problem, it's wise to either stay indoors or at least wear a mask that will filter out the poison. But cigarette smokers have their own little concentrated toxic smog pack that they don't avoid.
Clean air is a basic right. The responsibility to ensure that falls to Congress and the president.
I don't operate on smokers. I tell cigarette smokers that I can operate on you, I get paid the same. And you might even do well. But it's the wrong thing to do. So I refuse to operate on you until you stop smoking.
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA has the ability to more stringently regulate dust. If the EPA determines more stringent standards are necessary, family farmers and ranchers, as well as rural economies, would be devastated.
I am very concerned that federal and state air quality programs do not consider public health in regulating certain classes of industrial air emissions.
Ever since I've been in Congress, various groups on the business side, those entities that are creating jobs out there, have felt that the Clean Air Act is really - that there are all sorts of presumptions in favor of the environmentalists.
We have a responsibility to protect public housing residents from the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, especially the elderly and children who suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases.