Political Quotes

“I thank both of my colleagues, and I thank my colleague from Florida for his courtesy. I am going to be brief. My views on this issue can be summed up in a tweet that I sent on Saturday. I was home having town meetings. I go to every county every year, and I had just wrapped up in Astoria, and I was on my way to Tillamook. We stopped at Rockaway Beach, on the spectacular Oregon coast, and I decided that I would send a tweet and start it off with a question: Drilling on the Oregon coast? The answer was this: You have got to be kidding me. On my watch, that is going to be the policy we are going to have for protecting the Oregon coast. That is what Oregonians are saying today, specifically. In fact, Oregonians are lining up to make their opposition known by protesting this proposal outside a meeting today, hosted by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in Salem. We have a picturesque coastline that looks as if it is right out of a storybook. It is 362 miles that supports 22,000 jobs and a $2 billion economy. Tourism, fishing, and recreation are all dependent on a healthy Pacific Ocean. Our coast is entirely publicly owned, and it has been protected from oil and gas drilling for decades. That is, in large part, because we have learned harsh lessons from the past. In 1999, the freighter New Carissa ran aground off the coast of Coos Bay. The ship split apart, spilling tens of thousands of gallons of oil and diesel that covered our beaches in oil and tar balls.…”