Steve Scalise: “I want to thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding and for bringing this legislation forward and, specifically…”

“I want to thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding and for bringing this legislation forward and, specifically, want to talk about title III of this bill, and that deals with the RESTORE Act. Of course, this Friday will mark the 2-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. People all across the country saw for weeks and weeks oil coming into the Gulf of Mexico, destroying ecosystems, destroying economic industries. And yet, still to this day, there is no mechanism in place to dictate what should happen to those fines that BP and the other responsible parties will have to pay under the Clean Water Act. In this component, the RESTORE Act actually sets that policy out. And it was the result of a compilation of work by Republicans and Democrats from all five Gulf Coast States who came together and recognized that the most responsible thing to do would be to dedicate that money, 80 percent of those fines, to the Gulf Coast States so that we actually have revenue to go and restore the damage that's been done. I think most people recognize the right thing to do is to dedicate that money, not to send it up to Washington to be spent on things unrelated, but to actually allow us to restore the damage that was done in the Gulf of Mexico from that tragedy, and that's what this bill does.…”