Jared Polis

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Mr. POLIS. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

Mr. POLIS. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), a member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, the Department of Homeland Security is about keeping our Nation and our citizens safe. Just as we fund the military to face threats abroad, Department of Homeland Security does that work to keep our communities safe at home. Now is not the time to play politics with our immigration laws as if it is a child's toy. If you want to talk immigration, let's talk immigration. We have a plan. The Senate passed a bipartisan plan with more than two-thirds support last session. Let's see some ideas about resolving our broken immigration system. The President's step is an important first step to keep our communities safer, by focusing our limited enforcement resources on criminals who represent a threat to our community. Do you want to undo that and instead use our enforcement resources to go after kids and families rather than criminals? That makes our communities less safe rather than more. Let's not play politics with Homeland Security. Pass a clean bill, and tackle the immigration issue.

Mr. POLIS

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes and 15 seconds to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Connolly).

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 35 seconds to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the rule and on the underlying bills--no committee hearings, no committee markup, no amendments on the floor of the House, a phantom pipeline, job-destroying, deficit- busting. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. POLIS. We are prepared to close if the gentleman from Texas is prepared to close.

Mr. POLIS. Reclaiming my time, if it exists already, I don't know why you are passing this bill. The truth is it does not exist to move the oil from the tar sands of Canada to our ports for export. That is what we are talking about here. As far as I can tell, there is nobody who wants to pay to build it because it doesn't make economic sense with oil at $52 a barrel. It might be a different discussion when oil is $110, $100, or even $90 a barrel. We had statistics that about 90 percent of the tar sands production requires oil at $75 a barrel and about 100 percent of it requires oil at $65 a barrel. When oil is about $52 a barrel, nobody is going to pay for this pipeline. It is a phantom pipeline. We are talking about issues that might have made sense to talk about if somebody actually wanted to do this pipeline, but before we waste the deliberative efforts of this body on a topic like this, we would like to see some evidence that somebody actually wants to build a pipeline there in the first place, not to mention that the other reason it is a phantom is nobody knows what the routing is going to be. It is still in flux. There is a lawsuit. Where is the final routing going to be? Not only are there serious doubts about who will finance the pipeline, but in addition, we don't even know where it is going to be. By the way, the costs of the pipeline have gone up. Transcorp says the pipeline will cost $8 billion--up from their estimates of $5.4 billion just a couple of years ago--not to mention that we are being asked to approve a pipeline that we don't even know the final routing of. Again, as one of the very first bills that bypasses committee, that nobody can amend here on the floor, we are asked to encourage employers to cut their employees from 40 hours to 39 hours, so they can eliminate their benefits and force taxpayers to pay for it to the tune of $53 billion over 10 years. We are being asked to approve a phantom pipeline that nobody wants to pay for and nobody knows where it is going to go. What a way to start a Congress. Let's do better. Let's defeat this rule. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. POLIS. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky).

Mr. POLIS. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), my distinguished colleague on the Rules Committee.

Mr. POLIS. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gene Green). (Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. POLIS. I yield the gentleman an additional 15 seconds.

Mr. POLIS. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Courtney) who, by the way, had an idea to try to improve one of these bills, and his idea is not even allowed to be discussed or debated or voted on here on the floor of the House.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. So here we are, Mr. Speaker. We have two bills that didn't go through any committee and that no Member of this body, Democrat or Republican, had a chance to amend. They went to the Rules Committee. No Members are allowed to amend them on the floor of the House, and they have to vote for them. One of those bills is for a phantom pipeline. We don't even know if anybody wants to build it, and we don't know where it is going to go. We don't even know whether this right of eminent domain might be given to a private company over this so that a company can condemn private property of a private landowner's and take it away. Those are some of the things that are being fought out in court and in law in States like Nebraska. Without even knowing where it is going to go or if anybody wants to pay for it or build it, somehow we are engaged with a permitting process. Let's go ahead and approve a 7-Eleven in Gerry Connolly's district. I would like a hotel at the corner of 29th and Arapahoe in my district, if we can do that, too. What are we doing--seizing all control here in Washington and taking it away from States and local governments and individual landowners, who normally have a say in these matters? Of course, there is the other bill that we have here. Again, it didn't go through committee. Nobody could amend it. It is a bill that increases the deficit by $52 billion by forcing Americans to take taxpayer subsidies for their health care rather than buying it themselves with their employee's share and their employer's share. It is a bill that encourages companies to cut their employees from 40 hours a week to 39 hours a week. It is a bill that will lead hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans to lose their health care and have to take taxpayer subsidies through the exchange to be able to even have any kind of health care. Look, instead of rehashing proposals that we voted on I don't even know how many times--in fact, we voted on this phantom pipeline when it was a little less phantom. I think there were actually people who wanted to build it when oil was $110 a barrel. Guess what? The costs of the pipeline have gone up by about 30 percent, and as far as we can tell, there has been no evidence presented, either in the Rules Committee or here on the floor, that anybody wants to build it. By the way, that is what congressional hearings are about in normal regular order, where there would be somebody to testify: ``Well, yes, we can build it at $70 a barrel. No, we can't build it at $70 a barrel.'' We don't even have that information. I have seen an independent report that said that the tar sands are not profitable at anything less than $65 a barrel. We are at $52 a barrel now. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Beyer) for his very first speech here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Mr. POLIS. I yield the gentleman an additional 15 seconds.

Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Castro).

Mr. POLIS. I yield the gentleman an additional 15 seconds.