Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. It is great to be with my friends on the floor. I saw an E&E story earlier this week titled ``House divided over impact, wisdom of clean energy bill.'' Where but in D.C. can you take an 8-page bill and turn it into a 900-page bill? Not only that, it authorizes $135 billion with no offsets, and it divides your own Caucus? You can't outspend some Democrats. When I testified against this bill at the Rules Committee on Monday, my friend Chairman Pallone kept making the point that all he wanted to do was get to a conference with the Senate. Congressman Tom Cole asked if the House position wouldn't be stronger with a bipartisan bill? I think the answer is yes, it would, but that is not what we have here today. Let me debunk this myth of bipartisanship. There are 38 bills from the Energy and Commerce Committee in this package, 38. Committee Republicans are neutral on four of them, and we support 11 and either oppose or have serious concerns with the remaining 23. Of those 38 bills, we had no regular order on 15 of them. The chairman used to beat us about the head and shoulders about regular order. And I know this is an irregular time, but 15 of these bills had no regular order, no hearing, no subcommittee mark, and no full committee mark. Only two had legislative hearings.…”