Political Quotes

“While Rome burns, Nero fiddles, and that is what we seem to be doing here in Washington. When we have historically the highest gas prices that any of us have ever seen, highest natural gas prices in our lifetime, a major blackout of the northeast, and we cannot pass an energy bill, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. The nay-sayers point out all these little problems for them and disregard all the humongous benefits that we have in this bill. Let me talk about MTBE. I am an ethanol guy, ethanol State, Illinois. We grow it, we refine it, we use it. The MTBE provisions do not relieve people of their liability if they spill MTBE. It does not relieve people of their liabilities if it goes out of their storage areas and contaminates the groundwater. What it does is it says if the Federal Government asks these people to refine MTBE, we told them to make MTBE, and now we are going to say they created a faulty product after the Federal Government told them to produce MTBE? That is why we do not have industry investing in this country. We have no certainty. Who else but the government tell them to go build a product and then that same government 15 years later sues them and says you can sue them, take them to court, close down this industry. It is a shame, it is embarrassing, and for that to be the reason that this bill fails, we ought to be embarrassed for ourselves.”