On the recordFebruary 15, 2012
I yield myself 1 minute. Here is the reality. The Republicans need money to build roads, so they want to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma has already made clear doesn't have the votes to pass in the Senate. The same thing is true for California and Florida and off the coast of Massachusetts and New Jersey. They want to drill there as well, and it's very clear that the votes aren't there in the Senate to accomplish that goal either. As the gentleman from California just said, the likelihood of finding any revenues from oil shale is at least two decades away, so there are no revenues there. There is another bill, by the way, that's going to come out here on the floor. And in order to find the revenues, do you know where they're going to drill? They're going to drill into the pensions of FBI agents; they're going to drill into the pensions of the researchers for cancer out of the National Institutes of Health; and they're going to drill into the pensions of the Border Patrol agents, who are protecting us right now down on the Mexico border. That's where they're going to find almost all of the money for this bill--in the pensions of those people. Is that really the way we want to build the roads of our country? I reserve the balance of my time.
