Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman from Washington for the time. Madam Speaker, I stand in favor of H.R. 5481, which gives subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. As we stand here today, oil is still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, and 242 miles of Louisiana shoreline are impacted by this oil. The highest priority for us must be to stop this leak and to get this mess cleaned up. BP must be held 100 percent accountable for their actions, and the administration must be accountable for their role in the response and oversight. Many questions are still without answers, the most pressing being what went wrong. The bill we have before us today would provide subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. This commission has been tasked by the President with providing recommendations on how we can prevent and mitigate the impact of any future spills that result from offshore drilling. Future tragedies that we are currently experiencing can only be prevented if we know what went wrong. We must find out who made the mistakes, who made the erroneous judgment, what failed, and just exactly what went wrong. I will also interject, Madam Speaker, that, in operations like this, there are many backup systems; there are many redundancies. So, for a tragedy and a disaster like this to happen, there had to be gross error and gross negligence.…”