Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I appreciate the efforts on the part of my colleague from Louisiana (Mr. Melancon). But what we have seen is, we have a current moratorium on deepwater drilling and a de facto moratorium on shallow water drilling. And I'm afraid that this amendment doesn't fully address the issue. It doesn't address the current moratorium, whereby we are hemorrhaging jobs. The 300 jobs my colleague over here, Mr. Scalise, just referenced were from Baker Hughes in my district, and those don't count the shallow water jobs that we are losing daily from companies I have been hearing about each day. So the problem we have is with the section on page 2, which continues to allow the Secretary this wide latitude beyond the normal permitting process. So we have a real problem with this. We think our motion to recommit that we are going to offer later will actually give a clean break on getting rid of this moratorium, which is killing American energy production jobs, making us more dependent on foreign oil. It's not the kind of policy that we need. I know my colleague from Louisiana (Mr. Melancon) wants to solve this problem, but we have concerns about this specific language.”