Lynn Westmoreland

Mr. WESTMORELAND

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Well, hopefully, Mr. Speaker, they can read this quote and see that there is no sincerity.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Here is a real chart of what the gas prices have done. You have got the Republican Congress, 12 years, and then you have got the Democrat Congress in just 18 months. But I was really surprised to hear the chairman of the Resource Committee talk about exporting Alaskan oil. There has not been any Alaskan oil exported in 8 years, 8 years. And we talk about, you know, if we are going to drill, I want to know--and this is shameful, but this is snake oil. This is snake oil. Mr. Speaker, what the American people are being sold today is snake oil. They set up a snake oil shop about 2 weeks ago over here, and it was shut down by the Republican minority because we would not go along with a suspension bill that did not allow drilling. Here we are right back again, trying to set up another snake oil shop with new ingredients, new facts that are being stirred around in the same thing to try to come up with a different result. It is not going to come up with a different result because we are not going to cave in to these snake oil salesmen. We are going to stand up for the American people and demand that we drill, that we open up our areas, that we use our own natural resources, that we don't go hat in hand to foreign countries, that we don't give Hugo Chavez $178 million a year, that we use our own resources. And we are not going to be tricked by these new escapades that are being put on by the majority party today. I feel like I am watching a ``Whose Line Is It?'' Because they are off on so many different things that I don't even know, Mr. Speaker, if they have read their own bill. They call it the DRILL bill. This is not about drilling. This is about tricking the American people. Mr. Speaker, I hope that we can pay attention to their words, because I want to show you, this is a quote from January of 2007.

Mr. WESTMORELAND

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Mr. Speaker, if this motion did pass, it could be recommitted back to the--and I doubt it will--it could be recommitted back to the committee from which it came and brought forth on the next legislative day.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Further parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Mr. Speaker, isn't it true that the majority leader and the Speaker of this House could call a vote at any time on increasing U.S. oil production to lower the gas prices for Americans?

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. WESTMORELAND

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I thank my friend from Washington for yielding. Mr. Speaker, this is almost comical. It is almost comical to have the gentleman on the other side of the aisle talking about the credibility that the Bush administration brings to this project. I have heard the gentleman give Bush no credit for anything. For anything. I hear him giving the Navy and the Coast Guard credit, the administration's Secretary of the Interior, whatever it is, credit. He has never given the Bush administration credit for anything. We had WHINSEC, which is in my district, talking about giving the military credit and the ability to put forth good judgment. He said, no, we're going to expose all the people that are attending this college, this facility, to help bring about peaceful negotiations and peace in Central America. This is almost comical. And I will tell the gentleman that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. We are exposing what this project is about, and they are grasping at straws to use the argument that they are saying and giving the credibility to the Bush administration when they have never given him credit for anything.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I want to thank my friend from Washington for yielding. You know, I am going to try to hurriedly plot these dots so you can connect them. But I want to go back because what I would call this Congress is the smoke and mirrors Congress. We have heard denials from the gentleman about what the real intent of this designation was and that the picture that we have here does not speak for what it is. I think, Mr. Speaker, most people can look at this photo, and you can call it wild and scenic if you want. It looks fairly wild; but scenic, I don't know. I haven't been there either. Let me say this. I think we need to get this into perspective as to the smoke and mirrors that has been going on in this Congress. I want to read a quote. Mr. Kanjorski was being interviewed by a paper in the town of Ashley. Mr. Kanjorski in his remarks said Democrats had overpromised during the 2006 congressional elections by implying they could end the war if they controlled Congress. Mr. Speaker, here is the result. It says, ``Now, anybody who is a good student of government would know that was not true.'' Mr. Kanjorski said that in an Ashley town hall meeting in August. ``But you know the temptation to want to win back Congress--we sort of stretched the facts, and the people ate it up.'' I think we are seeing a continuation of that. We are stretching the facts that this is wild and scenic. Now, I think you go back, and this could go back to May of 2007 when we passed the Udall amendment in this House which prohibited the mining of shale oil out west. At that point in time, even by the majority charts, the price of crude oil went sky high with speculation because finally the speculators realized that we were not going to do anything to meet our own energy needs. Just since President Bush lifted the executive ban and since he had the press conference yesterday about drilling, just the very mention about lifting the ban, starting to drill and starting to look at our own production and our own resources, the price of a barrel of oil has dropped over $10 a barrel. Now we can do something here, but this is just another nail in the coffin for us that people are going to see that we don't want to increase energy production. Let me tell you something, the people up north had better understand that the price of natural gas and home heating oil is double what it was last year. So now if you get cold in your home in the winter, you are not even going to be able to afford to drive somewhere warm. So this, I think, if you look at it and if you look at the overall connection of the dots----

Mr. WESTMORELAND

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I think I know the answer to this, but if this motion to recommit did pass and the bill was sent back to the committee from which it came, could the bill not be reported back to this House on the next legislative day?

Mr. WESTMORELAND

Mr. WESTMORELAND. So 2 years on State property versus 12 years on Federal land.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. If I could reclaim my time for 1 minute, could you comment on I believe it's the Atlantis platform and how many years it took and how many barrels a day it's now producing?

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I want thank my colleague from Georgia. Now I want to recognize my other colleague from Georgia, another doctor, seems like we have a lot of doctors in our delegation, but my friend from Georgia, Dr. Price.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I thank my friend from New Jersey, and he is the only member of the New Jersey delegation who has signed a petition that says ``I want to lower gas prices for Americans.'' It is now my honor to let my colleague from Georgia, Dr. Gingrey, have some time.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Just reclaiming my time for a minute, it's a shame that that 73 percent of the American people that my friend from Georgia commented on will never get to see a vote on this House floor, never get to see a vote on this House floor if the process remains the same. We heard from Speaker Pelosi yesterday, and her intention is to keep the process the same, closed rules and suspension bills. So that 73 percent that is saying, hey, drill here, drill now, drill in my backyard, wherever you got to drill, we need to bring down the price of gas, they will never get to know how their Congressman feels about that, because we will never have an opportunity. I yield back to my friend from Georgia.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. And they are doing it in an environmentally safe way? There's been no spill or leakage or anything?

Mr. WESTMORELAND. But there is still a permitting process that I want to talk about. And the very fact when we hear the other side say that it will take 22 years to get anything out of these wells, you are talking about 2 years to get natural gas. Mr. Speaker, let me say that natural gas was about $6.60 a thousand cubic feet last year, and it is about $12 this year. So while we have a lot of Americans feeling the pain at the pump this winter, they are certainly going to feel the pain at home. I want to point out that this chart takes in the leasing process. And this purple area right here is the preleasing process. The orange is the leasing process, and then the blue is the notice of staking and the green is the application to drill. This is on Federal on shore oil and gas leasing and permitting process. Every time you see one of these red dots here, this is a point of entry for legal action. And so you can see that this process is a lengthy process. When the majority talks about 68 million acres in the use or lose it, last night as we had an opportunity, Mr. Speaker, to go back and forth for 2 hours with the majority, I think that they admitted that that 68 million acres that they are claiming, and we don't know, Mr. Speaker, where that 68 million figure came from because that was done not by the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service but by a committee report from the majority in the Resources Committee. So we don't even know how they came up with the 68 million acres. But the point is that 68 million acres is somewhere in this process. It is somewhere in this process. So the use it or lose it is a very, very misleading statement. I would like to recognize my friend from Texas.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Just reclaiming my time 1 minute. I would like you to explain just very briefly about the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, DFW, and the fact that this was State-owned property versus Federal property and how quickly that oil was produced out of that site. If you could just touch on that very briefly.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Mr. Speaker, it's good to be here tonight. And we're going to talk a little bit about what is on most people in this country's mind, and that's the price of gas, and the price of energy in general. We're going to be talking about gas tonight and the expense that it takes for American families to go on vacation, just go to work, even go to the store, Mr. Speaker. And so I know that's at the forefront of most Americans' minds today. Let me just start out by saying that what we want to do tonight, Mr. Speaker, is just point out a few things that may be not consistent with what's coming out of the majority's side about what we're doing about gas prices and what can be done about the price of gasoline now. And we've heard everything from, well, it will take 22 years to get any oil that's in the ground now, that's in our Outer Continental Shelf or in our national lands to the market. And that's not true. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that tonight. And I'm joined by friends of mine, the gentleman from New Jersey and the gentleman from Illinois, and we're going to share some of those things. But first of all, Mr. Speaker, let me explain that about, I guess, a month ago I was approached by constituents in my district, and they were talking to me about petitions, and petitions that were on the Internet, calling and asking me if I had signed petitions. Some of them were ``increase domestic oil drilling,'' which American Solutions had, some are ``gas tax holiday'' that presidential candidate Senator McCain had, ``develop alternative energy sources,'' which is Energypetition.com. And then there were petitions against drilling in ANWR. Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer from California had one, and Mr. Speaker, the Sierra Club, Green Peace. There were different petitions. There was actually a ``cap oil company profits by new government regulations.'' There are some people in the majority that believe that we can actually regulate our way out of this energy crisis, so one of those was Moveon.org. After talking to my constituents about all these different petitions--and they were calling me and asking me if I had signed, they were going to these web pages and either signing or voicing their protest--I was at a service station at home and there was another petition there and it said, ``sign this petition if you want to lower gas prices.'' And I'm assuming that the proprietor of that station was doing that to give people something to do when they were paying for their gas rather than fuss at him. But what it brought to mind is we, in this body, Mr. Speaker, are beginning to see how our constituents feel about this. I know today we were at a press conference where American Solutions presented the minority leader in the House and in the Senate with a petition. And I think later on--I don't know whether it's this week or next week--they're going to present this same petition to the majority leader in both the House and the Senate, it may be even Mr. Reid in the Senate and Speaker Pelosi here in the House. But what I decided to do was to come up with a petition so our constituents would know how the Members in this body--the 435 Members that are elected to be voting Members, the seven delegates from the American territories here--I decided that, you know, it would be good for those constituents to be able to see how their representative felt about increasing our oil production to lower the gas prices because that's one of the things that is going to help us. And it's more of an ``all of the above,'' but one of the key ingredients is just voting or having a vote that we could increase our oil productions, whether that's shale oil, oil coming from biomass--which is a new technology that's coming out today--whether it's drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, drilling on Federal lands, drilling in ANWR, whatever the case may be. So I came up with a simple petition, and it says, ``American energy solutions for lower gas prices: Bring onshore oil online, bring deepwater oil online, and bring new refineries online.'' And, Mr. Speaker, a lot of people may not realize that we have not built a refinery in about 30 years in this country. And even some of the refineries that are online today produce diesel that has to be exported because it does not meet the new sulfur limits that we have put on some of the diesel fuel that's used in this country. And so I came up with this, and then I made a simple petition, Mr. Speaker. And I think this petition is probably just too simple for some of the people in this body because it's not a piece of legislation, it is simply a statement, Mr. Speaker, to the people that they represent to let those people know how they feel about increasing U.S. oil production. And it simply says, ``I will vote to increase U.S. oil production to lower gas prices for Americans.'' And that's about as simple as you can get because I think that's what the American people, Mr. Speaker, want to see is that we're doing something, that we're taking some action. You know, we have voted on several bills in probably the last 2 weeks, ``use it or lose it,'' which a lot of my colleagues from the majority side went home and told their constituents that this was a pro-drilling bill. Well, I disagree with that, it was not a pro- drilling bill; and it was actually very misleading in the fact of use it or lose it, and we'll go into that in just a minute. But so far, Mr. Speaker, we've had 191 Members sign this. We've had eight Democrats, 183 Republicans that have signed it. Of course it takes 218 to do anything in this body. But this is not a discharge petition. This is just a simple pledge, or not really a pledge. It's just a petition that people can sign to let their constituents know. And what we have done to make it easy, Mr. Speaker, for people to realize or to understand if their representative has signed this is we set up a little Web page. It's www.house.gov/westmoreland. And on there we have people that have signed it, we have people that have refused to sign it, and then those that we have not talked to yet that have not signed. So, Mr. Speaker, I would encourage you, if you wanted to know how different Members in your delegation either signed or not signed and just for people would know that they could go to this Web site, www.house.gov/westmoreland, to find out. And it's interesting because of some of the articles and press releases that I have been reading, I guess, for the last week or so, what we have got is we have got people going home saying one thing and then coming back to Washington and doing something else or not doing what they said they were going to do for the people that vote them into office. So I would hope that we could finally make people match their walk to their talk. So I think this is just an interesting tool that people can use to find out if their Congress person is matching the talk. I yield to my friend from Illinois.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. But they started the process in 1985.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I want to thank my friend for that. You are right. What the Republican message has been is all of the above. You know, we believe in conservation. We believe in renewable energy. We believe in wind and solar, but we also believe in the new technology that's environmentally safe that we can use to drill in these deep-water areas of the Outer Continental Shelf that we can use to get shale oil out of the ground in the western States, which this Congress, in May of 2007--and I don't have the chart up here with me tonight--but in May of 2007 is when the speculation market shot sky high on the price of oil because they saw that night in May when Mr. Udall's amendment was passed that said we could no longer drill or mine for the shale oil in the western States where there are 2 trillion, 2 trillion with a T, barrels of oil. It is off limits, and I want to say that H.R. 6, which was passed by this body, under a closed rule, which means there was no amendments, no amendments allowed whatsoever from the minority, that they passed it. We called it the no-energy bill. At the time it was passed, gas was about $2.25 a gallon. I want to read one comment that was made, this is on January 18 of 2007, H.R. 6. ``It is sad to see the Republicans come to this. Now they are laughably saying that this will lead to higher prices.'' That was Mr. DeFazio from Oregon, and this was on the Democrat energy bill. We said then that it will lead to higher gas prices, and we were right. What we are saying now is let's look at all the measures, all the measures. We heard my friend from Texas say, in a 2-year period they were getting natural gas out of the wells at the Dallas airport. This can happen, but in order to happen, we have to get out of the fetal position. We have to get out of that political correctness mode and do what's right. In order to do what's right, we need to have an open-rule bill come to this floor so all 435 Members of this body can have some input and all Americans can be represented in this body and it not just be a closed place. Let me say this, when the process is broken, the product is flawed. This process is broken. We ask the majority--we ask the American people to help us create an open process so all views can be put out. Then all of the above that uses all the tools in our tool chest can be used to lower the price of gas and energy for the American people. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I want to thank my friend from Illinois, and I want to just comment on a couple of things he said. Those things that you proposed would create American jobs, good- paying jobs. Most of those refineries are union jobs, and these are jobs that are going out of the country right now because there's not enough work here. And building these pipelines, building the refineries, the oil rigs, the things to convert the coal to liquid, I mean these are American jobs and American money that are going overseas and out of this country. And we hear the majority complain all the time about our sending jobs out of the country. This is what we are doing. And not only that, for people who talk about our trade deficit, and I know my friend from Texas can talk about that, but these are all things that we need to take into account. And like my friend from Illinois said, this is an all of the above. The other thing that that brings up is we know that the three energy bills that were brought to the floor were under suspension. Now, Mr. Speaker, you know what ``under suspension'' means. And just to explain a little bit, ``under suspension'' means that you have about 20 minutes of debate on each side, a total of 40 minutes, no amendments, and typically there hasn't been a hearing, a committee hearing. So while we are passing these bills, and, in my opinion, it's been putting lipstick on a pig because some of these things that we have passed are already the law, just not being enforced, and other things I don't really believe are helping, they are just political correctness that we are trying to do, but there has been no input from the minority. A side that represents about 50 percent of the people in this country have no input into the process. So I know you would have some great input into the process if we could just be allowed to have an amendment on the floor. But for some reason, the majority is afraid to allow us to have a vote. I want to read one thing that Speaker Pelosi said yesterday about using suspensions. She said, ``We are trying to get our job done around here, and we work very hard to build consensus. And when we get it, we like to just move forward with it, as we did on the Medicare bill,'' which is one of the largest expenditures we have had probably this year in this Congress that was done under suspension, ``as we did with the SPR bill, and the list goes on and on. But it is not about a tool. It's about the legislative process and how we get a job done.'' That legislative process that's being done in this House today is broken. And when the legislative process is broken, the product is flawed. And I think that's what we have seen because if you look at when Republicans took Congress, gas was $1.44 a gallon. When the Democrats took control, it was $2.10 a gallon. And now it's $4.11 a gallon. This is what you get from working with a broken process and doing political correctness over the people and using power and politics over doing what is right. So this is what you end up with. And this is what the American people, Mr. Speaker, are complaining about and rightfully so. Because we have the ability to provide our own energy resources. But because of politics, we are being voted from even having discussions on this floor or taking a vote on anything that we believe would be both a short-term and a long-term. I would like to recognize my colleague from Texas, Mr. Conaway.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I want to thank the gentleman from Texas. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. WESTMORELAND

Mr. WESTMORELAND. I just wanted to ask the gentleman from New York one question. When he was talking about the profits for these oil companies, are they making 50 percent profit or are they making 30 percent profit or are they making 25 percent profit? What percentage of their sales is that profit? I am just curious to understand.

Mr. WESTMORELAND

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Would the gentleman from Texas just yield for one minute?