John Culberson: “Imagine if you are, Mr. Speaker, a business owner, a banker, someone who wants and needs and is prepared to make a…”

“Imagine if you are, Mr. Speaker, a business owner, a banker, someone who wants and needs and is prepared to make a significant investment because these are tremendously expensive operations to drill in either shallow--or in the deep water they're even more expensive--imagine you want to make that investment but you're, A, not sure is the permit deep or shallow. Well, it has now been rewritten by the Obama administration, attempting to circumvent the Federal court's order stopping the moratorium. The administration has simply rewritten their moratorium to bypass the court order. So if you as a company are trying to make this significant investment, significant amount of money, you have no way of knowing when or if permits are ever going to be issued, what type of permits are possibly ever going to be issued. They're just going to leave. The money, as Congressman Brady has said so eloquently, will go overseas. The rigs, the equipment, the jobs, the talent, the skilled American jobs that have worked; people in families generation after generation that have worked in the offshore oil industry in the United States will just leave. They're gone. Again, I know this firsthand. I've met these men and women. I know how committed they are to finding and producing oil and gas cleanly and safely. And no one has got a bigger stake than they do.”