Watch Daines’ remarks HERE.
“I do find it a bit humorous when you hear Kamala Harris talk about ‘on day one’ to translate three and a half plus years. That’s over 1,300 day ones that she’s had so far.
“But I’ll tell you what she has been doing. This Administration’s policies are harming our Montana way of life.
“Let me give an example. Just last week, we got the terrible news that the Stillwater mine is laying off 700 miners. The mine is just south of Big Timber in Columbus, Montana. It’s a very important strategic mine for our country, because it produces palladium and platinum. Now these are really good paying jobs. These mining jobs are in the six-figure range, plus a very healthy and generous benefits package. These mines produce platinum and palladium. They’re used in cars and catalytic converters to reduce the pollution that comes out of the exhaust, as well as electronics. And instead of getting palladium from Montana mines, Biden and Harris are allowing Russia to flood the market. That is why the layoffs occurred. The Russians are flooding the U.S. markets. There are very few producers of palladium in the world. They drove the price down and forced the mine to have to lay off about half the workforce, 700 miners.
“And adding insult to injury, Vladimir Putin uses that money to fund his war in Ukraine. So these are the consequences of this Administration’s obsession with radical environmentalism, otherwise known as the Green Dream, and now we’re bearing the brunt of these policies.
“Here’s another example. I can tell you; Montanans are tired of breathing smoke during fire season. Last week, there was a kid’s sporting event in Boulder, Montana, canceled due to smoke from wildfires. This is a result of Montanans and many out west of not being able to get in and thin and manage their forests. Proper thinning is a way to reduce the risk of wildfires. And why is that? I’ll tell you why. The Ninth Circuit Court, one of the most liberal in the country, buries our forest managers in litigation and doesn’t allow them to manage the forests. They’re spending all their time with lawyers and litigation instead of getting the loggers into our forests to thin them. They’ve tied up 300 million board feet of timber in Montana in litigation. That’s just in Montana alone. That’s enough to build nearly 25,000 homes. The Biden-Harris EPA…You know what we call the EPA out in Montana? ‘The employment prevention agency.’
“They’ve launched a war on Montana’s Colstrip. They’ve launched a war with EV mandates. This is the biggest war on made-in-American energy we’ve seen, certainly in my lifetime. So the American people must reverse this course seven weeks from today, 49 days away. We’ll have an election, and we’ve got to let the American people speak loud and clear they want to change the direction of this country and remove Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from office.”