Political Quotes

“I do support the passage of this emergency supplemental, but I want to point out to my colleagues something very important that happened in that committee. There is the presence of a rider in this particular bill. I think you ought to know about it, because you are going to get asked about it. It will hurt American taxpayers. It will take literally $5.5 million a month out of their pocket and put it into the pocket of big oil companies. Now, what is this about? I will tell you in my remaining time. The Mineral Management Services spent 2 rac{1}{2} years working on a rule to figure out the best way to collect royalty payments from oil companies. What are royalty payments? They are payments that go to the taxpayers when the companies drill on public lands. In this particular emergency supplemental bill is a rider that never was part of the House bill, was never part of the Senate bill. We had 10 minutes to discuss it. And it stops this rule from going into effect. So every month that this new rule is stopped from going into effect, $5.5 million--”