Jerry Moran: “Well, we certainly know that our constituents are paying too much at the pump, but we also know where that money's…”

“Well, we certainly know that our constituents are paying too much at the pump, but we also know where that money's going. Almost $30 billion, just in the last 3 months, went to the top three oil companies, Exxon, Shell and BP. Remember BP? Over $7 billion just this quarter in profit, not revenue, pure profit. And that's after the American taxpayer, which we say we're so concerned about, shelled out $5 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas companies. That's profit of more than $100 billion on an annual basis. That's where the money's going. And within that profit, not revenue, profit, we're talking about, what do they do with it? Ninety percent of it is used for stock buybacks and dividends to enrich the executives and the shareholders and to spend on TV advertising to convince the American public they're spending on just the opposite. Ten percent is going for drilling exploration. Now what this legislation would do is to bring us back to a period of even weaker regulation than we had before the gulf oil spill. Imagine, it just happened, 200 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf Coast waters, and now we want to make the governing regulations weaker than they were before the spill. And then we want to open up the area off the shore of Virginia where thousands and thousands of jobs are dependent upon the naval operations that take place in those waters which would not be able to be conducted if we go ahead and drill in these waters.…”