Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. It is interesting. I heard some speakers--and everybody is just trying to talk about these issues from their viewpoint. I get it. However, I heard some speakers on the other side of the aisle say today that we are just catering to Big Oil and others. Then I hear there were discussions with larger folks, and those are the people who are okay with it. I hear from Representatives from places like Alaska, North Dakota, and Texas whose constituents oftentimes are small mom-and-pop operations. It is hard to think of oil and natural gas that way, but that is the way it is in those regions. They say this will, in fact, hurt them and this is disastrous. I suspect, Mr. Speaker, the reason that we have this dichotomy, this difference, is that a lot of times bigger institutions, bigger organizations, can afford to take on a new regulation. It will cost them a little bit of money. It will make the cost of production go up a little bit, but because they are large, they can spread that out over a lot of different items or a lot of different--I guess, in this case, it would be oil and gas measured in cubic feet, or whatever the measurement is these days. As a result, they can say this is a cost spread out over a large piece of the pie so it is not that big of a deal to us. As I said in my opening, there are 9,000 small and midsize independent petroleum drillers in the United States.…”