Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, in 1995, President Ford signed a bill to ban the sale of crude oil overseas. Two years ago, we repealed that ban, and, last month, we were exporting some days 3 million barrels of oil per day. {time} 1545 We have gone from a nation that was importing up to 80 percent of our oil to a nation that, today, if we absolutely had to, could be totally energy independent. Because of the Arab oil embargo in the early 1970s, a little before President Ford signed the bill that said you couldn't export crude oil, we established a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The idea was that we wanted to store oil in underground caverns--crude oil--so that, if there were another supply disruption, we would have the crude oil even if the OPEC cartel cut off oil shipments to the United States. We have authorized up to a billion barrels of crude oil in this reserve, and there is currently a little under 700 million barrels. But, Madam Speaker, we don't need 700 million barrels of crude oil today because, as I have just pointed out, when we allowed crude oil to be exported, we unleashed a drilling boom in the United States that has driven our oil production on a daily basis from around 6 million barrels of oil per day to, this past month, 11 million barrels of oil per day. So, hence, the idea embodied in H.R. 6511, cosponsored by my good friend from Chicago, Democrat Bobby Rush. It is pretty straightforward.…”