Debbie Dingell: “Mr. Speaker, I love my colleagues on the other side. I know they are sincere and I understand and I sympathize with them…”

“Mr. Speaker, I love my colleagues on the other side. I know they are sincere and I understand and I sympathize with them because they have difficulty in understanding the parliamentary situation. We have been grappling around with the business of passing a comprehensive energy bill now for about 8 years. I have listened to my colleagues on the other side promise us that we would have a bill on the floor in 2 weeks, or we would have a bill passed by the end of the session. None of those promises have been good. We are still grappling around with a piece of legislation. The Senate, it could not pass a bill, so they took the bill that they had passed last year and they passed it and they went to conference. The Member of the Senate who says he will be the senior Member of the Senate body considering this legislation says they are going to write the bill in conference. What bill are they going to write? I do not know. But I have written several large energy bills, and I would note to my colleagues that the time of the writing of these, including the time in conference, was somewhere between 18 months and 2 years, the full period of a session in the Congress and the second session besides.”