Political Quotes

“Madam President, I rise to talk about the oilspill in the gulf and the continuing challenges it presents to us. I know some of my colleagues are going to be joining me in a few moments to talk about this. I will ask consent for a colloquy. But I am going to make a few comments about it and then, in recognition of Senator Inhofe's need to move to another commitment, I will ask unanimous consent at that time. I want to make absolutely certain that big oil polluters pay for oilspills and not the taxpayers--not small business owners, not States or the Federal Government, which means the Federal taxpayers. We have seen things get worse on the spill over the weekend. Unfortunately, things are, frankly, getting much worse than we would have imagined when we first introduced this legislation. Today the United States declared a fishing disaster in three gulf States--in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Louisiana's fishing industry alone is $2.4 billion of seafood and supplies up to 40 percent of all the U.S. seafood in our country. It is, in my mind, a growing and continuing environmental and economic disaster. Tragically, it seems to me, a $10 billion cap--we originally thought, based upon the Exxon Valdez experience, where there were close to $4 billion in claims 20 years ago, that was a cap that may have been an appropriate one.…”