Political Quotes

“Thank you very much. It is not often that the distinguished ranking member on the EPW Committee gets to say he is from a bigger State and give his advice in those terms. I appreciate that we from Rhode Island were able to give him this moment. I also want to thank him for his leadership in trying to fight for strong fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission standards for our automobiles. The story of what is going on cannot be properly understood without understanding the oil industry's role in all of this. They are up to their usual mischief. Our offices obtained a draft letter to the Deputy Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, urging her to weaken the auto emission standards. Well, we were able to look at the metadata on this document, and guess who wrote it. It was written by one of Marathon Petroleum's in-house lobbyists. Marathon shopped this letter, which their lobbyist wrote, around to Members of Congress, convincing several to send similar letters in favor of weakening the standards. We took those letters, and we ran them through plagiarism software, and this is what we got. The red text is the text that is identical to the language of the Marathon lobbyist's letter. The black is where, in this case, Members of the Pennsylvania delegation added a little local information about Pennsylvania. It is an 80-percent match in the plagiarism software to the letter written by the Marathon Oil company lobbyist.…”