On the recordDecember 15, 2011
I thank the gentleman from Nebraska for yielding and for all of your hard work on this issue. This is an issue that is important to the United States of America. It's just that simple--that you don't have this kind of an opportunity in the economic environment that we have in this country very often. We have a country that has seen the worst unemployment, rampant unemployment and has had the most number of quarters with bad unemployment figures since the Great Depression. And here we have our Canadian neighbors to the north with this Keystone XL pipeline that is proposed to stretch 1,700 miles, cost $7 billion to construct over a 2- year period, and create 100,000 or more jobs for America. And this is paid for. This is other people's money. We're not asking the Federal Government to spend more stimulus money on this energy project, as it did on the famous Solyndra project in California. We're asking it just to approve this pipeline. Now the reason I'm here to talk is because starting at age 16 until I graduated from law school, every summer of my life, I worked on pipelines. I was not the engineer. I was the guy with the shovel. I dug the ditches, and I cut the grass and operated the survey crew, and I gauged the gauges. And I did all of the various things that need to get done. I have done them in the State of Texas, in the State of Louisiana, and I was actually on a pipeline that stretched from northern Holland to Belgium in Europe. I worked there one summer.…
