On the recordMay 17, 2012
I thank my friend and colleague from Georgia for the time, and I rise in full support of his motion to instruct the conferees to support the Keystone pipeline. A lot of numbers and a lot of facts have been given out. I will not repeat those. I will just cover a couple of points very quickly. We have heard through the past years and even decades, we've talked about energy independence, but yet we haven't gotten that. We have the opportunity to create North American energy independence if we just make a few good decisions. This is one of them. It's time. We've talked about this long enough. It's time to move this pipeline forward for all of the benefits that we can receive in jobs, in energy security. It's time. We've heard a lot of discussions tonight about what the administration might say or Congress might say or the petroleum people and a few others. But we haven't heard something, an opinion for the American working families. Our families are desperate for energy security, for the pricing stability. This is a step towards that. We should not forget at all our American working families, our responsibility to helping them as they struggle to get by in this tough economy. They have to be front and center in this decision. So I encourage my colleagues to vote ``yes.'' And I appreciate, once again, my colleague bringing this motion forward.
