Political Quotes

“Mr. President, if I may be recognized, I want to point out that later on today we are going to have an amendment that is bipartisan. It is an amendment that, of its original filing with 10 Senators, 3 of them are Democrat and seven of them are Republican. It is called the RESTORE Act. What it does is when the fine is determined on BP because of the 5 million barrels of oil they spilled--the fine allocated according to the Water Pollution Act, which says that a fine will be levied upon anyone who spills a barrel of oil in public waters, and, of course, because of the enormous amount of oil that was spilled, this could be a very substantial fine, 5 million barrels of oil--once that fine is determined, then the question is how is it going to be allocated. If nothing is done, only about $1.5 billion would go into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. The rest of it is undeclared. Naturally, what the Gulf Coast Senators wanted to do was to have some of that money come back to restore the gulf--the critters, the water, and the people who are the ones who suffered as a result of the BP oilspill. What we have worked out is a formula, that 20 percent of whatever the fine is would go back to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund and the remaining 80 percent would be allocated according to a formula devised by the National Gulf Restoration Council, appointed by the States and the Federal Government. It would go to make the environment of the gulf whole.…”