Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman for yielding. Madam Speaker, I rise today in strong support of the bill before us now, H.R. 2693, the Oil Pollution Research and Development Program Reauthorization Act, and shortly we will be discussing H.R. 5716, the Safer Oil and Natural Gas Drilling Technology Research and Development Act. I want to begin by complimenting our chair, Ms. Woolsey and Ranking Member Hall for two outstanding pieces of legislation that could not be more timely, and that are tremendously important given not only the events we are facing in the gulf today, but towards trying to prevent these kinds of incidents from occurring in the future. I want to start by commending the many thousands, more than 33,000 people who are in the gulf today working on this cleanup effort. I had the privilege of traveling there recently, along with members of our Science Committee staff, and when I met with some of those folks I asked what can we do to help? And their answer was the first thing you can do is tell people that we are working tremendously hard, and we are making a real difference. We have people working in more than 100- degree weather, in a terribly difficult environment, and they are working 12- to 14- to 16-hour days, 7 days a week. And they often feel that all they get is criticism. They are making a real difference. It's a heroic effort, an unprecedented scale, and we should be proud of them.…”