Bob Menendez: “I rise because the Senate has three choices on how it is going to protect coastal communities from the economic ravages…”

“I rise because the Senate has three choices on how it is going to protect coastal communities from the economic ravages of the oilspills we are seeing in the gulf. We can have fishermen, coastal residents, and tourism-based small businesses endure the suffering of lost revenue caused by a manmade disaster that was no fault of their own, which clearly in my mind isn't fair, we can have taxpayers provide them with a safety net, which I oppose, or we can make polluters pay all the damages they caused from a spill, which is the appropriate course. It is not a hard choice. When I was a kid, my mother taught me all I think we need to know here, and I am sure everybody was taught the same way: You clean up your own mess and you are responsible for it. That is all we are asking BP or any other company to do: Clean up the mess, pay for whatever mess you can't clean up yourself and the damages that flow from what you did. The current law sets a $75 million cap on how much an oil company has to pay for damages. So I have introduced a bill, along with a number of my colleagues, raising that liability cap for offshore oil well spills from $75 million to $10 billion.”