Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, supposedly today we unite to bring relief to gulf coast families. But I tell you, if you vote for this bill, there is no unity with gulf coast families. This bill actually prolongs the misery of the gulf coast. It kills jobs. How does it do so? It raises taxes on domestic oil and gas but not on foreign. We're going to prejudice towards a foreign product. It's a reverse tariff. Call it a jobs program for OPEC. Now the $22 billion that we raise, by the way, isn't to benefit the gulf. It's to buy parkland across the United States. So when everybody says we're going to raise $22 billion for the gulf, they're raising $22 billion for parklands across the United States. And now we're going to raise the liability caps because we're going to stick it to Big Oil. We're not sticking it to Big Oil. What we're doing is we're sticking it to small and medium size independent producers who control 90 percent of the leases and, by the way, create 300,000 jobs. This bill kills jobs. And what is most egregious is the ``Buy American'' provision. We're not only helping the gulf; we're patriotic. Oh, my gosh. But let's look at it. We haven't built a deepwater rig from beginning to end in over 10 years in the United States. By June of 2011, we've got to create the infrastructure and put out the rigs in order to drill. Now what we do do here is the high value-added, high-tech buildup on top of the hull type job. Those are gone because we don't have the capability to build the hull.…”