Political Quotes

“I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), the ranking member. Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, what we are talking about here is obscenely profitable oil companies getting a giveaway while we are running massive deficits. Now, everyone says that they want to run government like a business and lower deficits. The GAO has estimated that if this is allowed to run its course without any of these leases being renegotiated, it will be a $50 billion windfall to the oil industry--not million, $50 billion. Now that would be a nice piece of change, both for revenue sharing for the States and for the Federal Treasury. We could apply it all to deficit reduction or other needs, maybe even fund the continuation of the national transportation system. Who knows. The bottom line is, as the gentleman pointed out, it may or may not have been intentional on the part of people at the then-Minerals Management Service to give away these assets to the oil companies. But for 3 years before they slept with them--or whatever happened-- they did include it in the leases. And then what the Court found was that the law that the Republicans passed in 1995 didn't allow those sorts of conditions to be in the leases. So this is a new approach. The Republican law was defective. The Clinton administration--at least some members of it--were corrupt. It is a bipartisan problem. Let's fix it in a bipartisan way.…”