Mike Conaway: “I thank the gentleman from Colorado for allowing me to join in; and although I'm not a part of the freshman class, I…”

“I thank the gentleman from Colorado for allowing me to join in; and although I'm not a part of the freshman class, I hope they won't toss me out of the Chamber as a result of that indiscretion. I wanted to walk us through kind of the process by which TransCanada has gone through trying to laboriously apply and comply with all of the rules, regulations, and hoops that anybody who tries to do a project of this scope has to go through. They began in September of 2008 when they filed their application for a permit to build this pipeline. As has been mentioned, the State Department would not be involved in this at all except for the fact that this pipeline crosses an international border. If this were just within the United States, the State Department and the President would be out of the loop in this instance. But because this is an international problem, then the State Department gets a whack at this deal. In April 2010, the State Department issued their draft Environmental Impact Study. Then, a couple of months later, in June of 2010, EPA weighed in with the results of their technical review and said that the draft Environmental Impact Study was deficient and didn't provide the scope and the detail, if necessary, for decision-makers to make their mind up.…”