Political Quotes

“We are indeed concerned about jobs. For the example that my friend from Louisiana gives about someone whose livelihood is at stake, I could produce dozens of others, maybe a shrimp fisherman. You know, my friends maybe remember the ``Forrest Gump'' movie. They've seen those pictures. In fact, my friend from Louisiana probably has been out on one of those shrimp boats. Well, they were sitting idle. They were sitting idle for weeks and weeks. The breeding grounds, the fisheries, were and still are in jeopardy. People all over the country are not buying the fish that drank of this black gold. In fact, 88,000 square miles, as I said earlier, of fisheries were polluted by this tremendous spill, and need I remind my colleagues that the coastal communities of the Gulf of Mexico, the heart of offshore drilling, that the jobs that are dependent on tourism and fishing exceed all the natural resource extraction and mining jobs by a factor of five, five times as many jobs dependent on tourism and fisheries. Yes, we should learn the lesson, rather than hurrying through these permits. We should learn the lessons of last year's oil spill and protect those jobs. I reserve the balance of my time.”