Jeff Bingaman: “Hearing objection, I wish to take a few minutes and explain the amendment I was intending to offer so that Senators will…”

“Hearing objection, I wish to take a few minutes and explain the amendment I was intending to offer so that Senators will understand what the alternatives are that we could be considering today. Madam President, just to pick up on the point the majority leader was making, I certainly want to build on the good work we did in this body last year with the passage of the Energy Act of 2005. I believe very strongly that the way to do that is to have an open process, allow Members to offer amendments, allow those amendments to be voted on, and see what the will of the Senate is. Unfortunately, that is not the process which is being used in connection with S. 3711. I stated extensively yesterday the substantive reasons I think S. 3711 is not good legislation, and I will repeat a few of those points. Let me talk about the amendment I wanted to offer this morning. The amendment I was going to offer consists of the text of S. 2253, which is the legislation we reported out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on a bipartisan basis in March. My amendment would take that language and it would modify it to add the so-called 181 south area for leasing. Let me put up a chart so everybody knows what is involved here. The white area on this chart, the box there, is the area that we proposed in our Energy Committee bill that we reported to the floor to open for leasing.…”