Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), the ranking member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Protecting our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act, the PIPES bill. I thank the chairmen of the subcommittee, the full committee, and also the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Representative Mike Capuano, and members of the Energy and Commerce Committee on our side. This is a good bipartisan product, something that is pretty rare around here these days. It reauthorizes the Department of Transportation's pipeline safety program for 4 years and includes a number of important measures that will better protect our communities, ensuring that pipelines are a safe means to transport natural gas, hazardous liquids, and crude oil. Most importantly, this bill gives the Secretary of Transportation new emergency order authority to impose certain emergency restrictions and safety measures on pipeline operators to address an imminent hazard resulting from an incident or an unsafe practice, which is authority that doesn't currently exist. Here is a good example. Fairly recently, we had a defective pipeline from China. We shouldn't be buying pipeline from China. But anyway, we had some defective, junky Chinese product pipeline, and there was an incident.…”