Joe Barton: “first I want to thank the distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) for graciously, and I mean this, providing us…”

“first I want to thank the distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) for graciously, and I mean this, providing us copies of the amendment. The majority staff had the odd page copies but not the even page copies. So we appreciate it. That shows how closely we had been tracking this. So I am glad we got the entire amendment, and I appreciate that. The gentleman from Ohio has many good ideas on the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and we have worked together on many of those ideas. This is not one of them. It is an idea, but just to put this in perspective, we use every day in this country 12 million barrels of gasoline, 12 million barrels. That is what we use to keep our transportation system going. The gentleman's amendment authorizes 20 million barrels; that is not even a 2-day supply. So even if this were implemented, it would be 1 1/2 days' supply. So that is the first problem with it. The second problem, the gentleman very graciously says we are going to put a reserve in the Northeast, put a reserve in the Midwest, put a reserve in California and in two other places. That is five places. Somebody is going to get left out. If we put one in the Northwest and in the Southeast, then the Southwest gets left out. If you put one in the Southwest and the Southeast, then the Northwest gets left out. So we have got a little bit of a problem there. We have got a security problem.”