Maurice Hinchey: “Anyone who thinks back just a few years would remember how this administration and the Members of the Congress who were…”

“Anyone who thinks back just a few years would remember how this administration and the Members of the Congress who were so complicit with them has been able to falsify information and get this country into such deep trouble. The situation in Iraq has got to come to mind. All of the deep problems we have there, based upon the falsification of information. That is what we are seeing here again, falsification of information. The Republicans are alleging that no one wants the oil companies to be able to drill for oil offshore when the fact of the matter is that the oil companies already have leases on 68 million acres, half offshore, half on the dry land of this country, and they are not using those 68 million acres. So what the Republicans want to do, at the request of this White House, is to continue to do what this administration has been doing since the meeting of Dick Cheney with the heads of the big oil companies in this country to continue to have an energy policy that is not in the interest of America but in the interest of the big oil companies. What they want them to do is to be able to get more land, more land, more public land, and hang on to that public land and not produce anything on it. What we are saying in this bill is use it or lose it. You already have the leases on 68 million acres of public land. Start using it. You want to drill, start drilling. We want you to drill. Drill on the leases that you already have.”