Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady and her staff for arranging this Special Order to discuss this issue that we have been talking about-- the egregious overreach of the Environmental Protection Agency. I want to talk about an issue that is very close to you and near and dear to you and that you have helped me on, and that is the spill prevention and containment countermeasures issue, which is facing farmers across the country. Mr. Speaker, we have taken action on this. If you are like me and if your staff is like my staff, we have fielded countless phone calls from farmers who are concerned about these new rules that the EPA was attempting to roll out with respect to on-farm fuel storage at, really, an unmanageable level. 1,320 gallons was the threshold that would require that the farmers construct these spill prevention and containment countermeasures. For those who don't know what those are, those are berms, or protective dikes, around a storage facility that can cost tens of thousands of dollars to ag producers. Farmers may be land rich--capital rich--but they are not cash rich by any stretch of the imagination, so this adds cost to their operations. Really, who pays for that? We have talked about it with our power plants. The ratepayers pay. The American people pay for that because prices go up.…”