Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I just would like to say to my friend across the aisle that I, as a member of the Democratic majority, consider the repeated, deliberate use of the phrase ``Democrat majority'' to be a pejorative use. That is not certainly what we call ourselves. And we could call you the Republic minority, but we don't. So, in the interest of bipartisanship and comity, I would suggest ``Democratic majority'' is the normal term to use.

I congratulate you on accepting and adopting most of the parts of your plan from our plan. The renewable energy and conservation components, which, by the way, the Vice President sneered at in 2002, I think it was, when he said that conservation may be a personal virtue, but it is no way to build a national energy policy.

We have been working, in this Congress, in the last year and a half to pass the first increase in fuel mileage standards in 32 years, to provide record, billions of dollars to alternative fuels research and development, record billions of dollars for carbon sequestration so that we can use coal that we have in this country without releasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

We have been trying, and I might say that perhaps your friend or the colleague in the Republican Party in the other body, Senator Domenici, could use a little talking to, perhaps from you, to get him to drop his resistance to the renewable energy standard and to the extension of the renewable tax credits which we have been fighting for on this side and have been stymied in the Senate by a small number of Republicans who are holding that up.

But allow me to go to what I was going to say, which is that in New York this morning, gas prices are over $4.25 and in some cases $4.50 and have been this high for weeks. These sky high prices are squeezing families in my district right now. Today we are trying to give them relief using SPR oil to increase supply and bring down prices.

A release of oil from the SPR is a proven method of calming markets and lowering prices. The last three Presidents have used it successfully. And I urge all my colleagues to support it to do the same thing today.

Announcement By the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. Speaker, I assure you that this Member is serious and sincere, and I strongly support the DRILL bill.

Gas in my district in the Hudson Valley is over $4.30, and families are paying and really being hurt by this. They need serious solutions that deliver real results, and that's why I support the Drill Responsibly in Leased Lands Act to take action right now to extract more American oil in the right places.

Oil company advocates have been preying on the anxiety of Americans to push the failed ANWR drilling plan that would only lower prices by a nickel in 20 years, 20 years in the future. Our drivers need more help than that, and they need it faster. The DRILL Act answers the call, telling oil companies to drill for oil that can give more relief than ANWR ever could.

The ``use it or lose it'' measure requires oil companies to drill on land they have already leased or make way for someone who will. If they did that, they could double production and cut imports by one-third. It also makes it easier to lease the 20 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, already approved for drilling, and calls on the President to build pipelines to bring that 10.6 billion barrels of oil to market. The bill will pave the way to get at the most oil in the shortest time with the greatest responsibility.

I hope all of my colleagues will support it.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Just briefly, I trust that you would offer a motion to recommit to do just that.

But I would just point out, going back a little bit, this map that I was holding up for Chairman Rahall, the more interesting thing about this map, and I hope it shows up on the cameras, is that the purple sections here are all Federal land that may be leased and has not been offered to lease. Now, I suggest that the Department of Interior ought to take that--that's most of these areas. The red is the part that is actually producing. The yellow or orange is the part that has been leased but is not yet producing. But the purple, most of this lower 48 or western half of the lower 48 on this map, land available currently for leasing that has not been leased; so I would just urge that it be leased. No Democrats that I know are opposed to leasing, counter to whatever may have been implied out there.

I just want to mention that the one thing we can do that will have an immediate impact, and we're talking 5, 10, 15 years, maybe 20 years out before ANWR or OCS has an impact, depending on whom you listen to, but the one tool we have, that the President has, which was used by the first President Bush in 1991 and again by President Clinton in 2000, is the SPR, releasing oil from the SPR to increase supply. In 1991 it resulted in a price drop of $8 per barrel, and in the year 2000, it brought down the price of oil by nearly 20 percent in a week. So I'm not saying it's the answer. I'm saying that it's a temporary thing and it's a tool that was given to the President by the Congress to deal with crises, which I believe were in one now, as our people are telling us.

All of us at home are hearing the same thing, I think, be it from parents driving their kids to school, commuters going to work, school systems that are barely able to afford to keep their school buses running, whatever it is, we need to provide immediate interim and long- term solutions. And one immediate thing that I think we should consider is releasing some amount of oil from the SPR.

Well I think that is a subject for some discussion. And perhaps somewhere between 30 and 50 million barrels would be a good starting point.

But the most interesting thing about it is that it's one of the few investments the American taxpayers made that has more than doubled in value. In other words, it was bought at less than $50. Most of the oil there was bought at less than $50 a barrel and then would be sold for whatever it's going for, $130 or $140, the current value. So there's a big mark-up. And there is an opportunity not only to provide supply, to loosen up the supply-and-demand equation, but also to use the proceeds from that for some important things such as compensating those who are hurt the most. In the northeast with home heating oil this coming winter, there are many people very afraid about paying $6 for home heating oil, truckers who are paying exorbitant amounts for diesel, or people on low incomes who can't deal with this, or for that matter investing in some alternatives to provide some competition for oil, which, by the way, I think we should get to. Because what we're really faced with here is we're talking about drilling and drilling and where we're going to drill and what kind of oil and how much sulfur, and is the diesel going here or is the diesel going there?

But we're still talking about being at the mercy of oil. And I think ultimately this conversation has to come around to breaking the monopoly, the energy monopoly, that oil has in this country.

If the gentleman would yield back.

I would just comment that it's likely should the countries that don't like us and would theoretically cut us off in a crisis would look elsewhere to sell their oil, and the oil would probably go on the world market to other countries, to China, to Asia and so on and would provide slack in the system overall worldwide which would enable us to buy similar quantities of oil from other sources. This is all speculation on our part.

But I would just say that it's not by any means certain that a cut- off of oil from a certain country to us would mean that we would not be able to get the same amount of oil elsewhere.

Let me also say, because there was a comment made before, just continuing on a couple of quick points, there was a comment made before, many comments about how the American people are hurting, and one comment about how the oil companies are being squeezed. I just wanted to show the profits of the oil companies since 2001 climbing from $30 billion profit to $123.3 billion profit in 2007. And this is just from 2007 to 2008.

Here is an increase for another record year of oil company profits in the first quarter of 2008, $36.9 billion. So the curve continues to go up even as the gentleman from Pennsylvania said I believe it was, or the gentleman from Connecticut, we've had in the last 6 years I think a 361 percent increase in the number of leases granted and 668 million acres, which is either in some part of the permitting process or has not yet been drilled on, but is available for drilling in the lower 48 and adjacent offshore leases. No matter what we do, the oil companies continue to make record profit among record profit.

So against that backdrop, I think it's really important to consider such things as the geothermal system. I was personally in the trench next to a house that was being built, fastening these loops of hose, of plastic piping, that is going to carry a glycol water mixture 6 feet underground and enable a 3,500 square foot house in Cold Spring, New York, to be heated and cooled for the cost of one 75-watt light bulb. There are four buyers so far that have come to this development and have been offered a house. I think the base price of the house is $350,000. In that part of New York, it's expensive. And that is what they're offering these homes at. Or they can pay the extra $15,000 up front for geothermal heating and cooling. And all four of the buyers have come in with today's price of energy and said, we will take the geothermal.

And the estimates of the company doing the work is that it will pay off in 3 years. If it's a full-time resident, it will pay off in 3 years. If it's a part-time weekend or summer home, it may take 7 years. But these are the kinds of things that are here today. And it's not rocket science. It's plumbing. And it's common sense.

And we need to do this because we're at the moment an oil-based economy, especially for aircraft. There is no getting around liquid fuels. You cannot fly a hybrid plane any time soon. But there are many other places that we can find other fuels and other sources of power, not only for transportation but for heating and cooling our homes and our businesses and free up the oil for the purposes that we really need it for.

I yield back to the gentleman.

I just know they have made the biggest profits in the history of any corporation in the history of the world, and that the CEO got a pension of $400 million. There are certain things that to the American people look excessive. I can't tell you whether they are. All I can say is what it looks like, and I can say that my sympathy for the oil companies is not at a very high level. Hence, my likelihood to pursue use it or lose it. If you are sitting on 68 million acres, some of which may be in the process of being developed, but my understanding is that all or most of it has passed the permitting stage and is ready for the drill bit to go in the ground, and the drill bit is not going in the ground because they are waiting for the drill rigs, they don't have enough offshore exploration ships. They have enough money to buy the company that makes the drill rigs. Most of these oil companies have more money than most countries have. When you are floating that kind of money, I think there may be another incentive at work which is where is the oil worth more? Is the oil worth more left in the ground or pumped and sold into dollars because the dollar is going down. You can't invest it in real estate right now because

that is going down. If you put it in the stock market, you are taking your chances. A financial analyst inside one of these oil companies may look at the choices and say, let's leave it in the ground. Let's acquire more and more leases and pump it in 5 years when it is worth more. I want to be sure that is not the incentive that is driving this.

Well, that is a very good question, and a philosophical one, I might add.

I would say your colleague, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden) who sits on the Energy Independence and Global Warming Select Subcommittee, asked the five CEOs of the biggest companies when they came in, and I am paraphrasing Mr. Walden, he said, I am a small businessman, I am a capitalist, I believe in making a profit, but at what point when you have made bigger profits than you have ever imagined, breaking your own record for 3 years in a row, is there some point where you would think about lowering your price to your customers? Is there ever a point where you feel that way?

No. What this chart shows is all profit. I don't know what percentage that is, how much deeper the iceberg goes below the starting point, but these columns stand for profit.

And I think when national interests conflict with corporate interests, that is when government needs to step in. The question is, are we at that point?

Mr. Speaker, American families and businesses are indeed reeling from record gas prices, the results of 7 years of missed opportunities and a 19th century energy policy this White House has allowed oil companies to write. President Bush's policy is only working for one group, the oil companies themselves.

Rather than looking for new solutions, Washington Republicans say that Big Oil needs access to more land and more water so they can drill for more oil. What my friends across the aisle refuse to acknowledge is that 68 million acres of oil reserves on 10,000 separate leases are already acquired by the oil companies for development and are ready for the drill bit to go into the ground. Permitting has been finished, and the oil companies are holding off.

Why are they holding off drilling on these 68 million acres of reserves? If they are really interested in drilling more at home, let's have them do that first before we give them access to the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge or our Atlantic and Pacific coasts. All they need to do is drill is on these 68 million acres they have already acquired. If they don't, I believe they should use it or lose it.

Mr. Speaker, in my district, my constituents are complaining and wondering why one day a gas tanker pulls up to a service station and fills a tank underground at the price of that day, and 2 days later the world price of crude oil goes up and the guy at the local gas station goes up on a ladder and changes the numbers, raising the numbers from $4.17 to $4.29, or whatever it is currently in the 19th Congressional District. We are well above $4 for regular. Why is it that gas that is already in the ground goes up on the world price of crude, but when the world price of crude comes down, the price at the pump detaches from it and keeps going up or staying up?

They ask me this question, and I ask people down here who supposedly know what they are talking about, and they tell me: Oh, it's a commodity. It fluctuates on the commodity market.

Well, I call it the rockets-and-feathers syndrome. The price of gas goes up like a rocket, and it comes down like a feather. And it never seems to deviate from that. While American families are scrimping, oil company profits are soaring. The Big Five's profits jumped a whooping $37 billion this quarter.

After the Bush administration's drill first and ask questions later policy has padded oil profits on the backs of working families, it is time for us here to look out for American drivers.

The Federal Energy Price Gouging Prevention Act, which I strongly support, will give the government the authority to investigate and punish anyone who takes advantage of consumers by running up energy costs with a steep fine and jail time.

After Hurricane Katrina, the FTC found 23 percent of refineries, 9 percent of wholesalers, and 23 percent of retailers had price spikes that could not be explained by increased costs or market trends.

We need to be aggressively vigilant to ensure that none of that behavior is going on and consumers are protected. President Bush threatened to veto this bill the last time Congress tried to take this action. I hope that this time he and his allies will for once choose to stand with the American driver and against Big Oil.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 435, I was in a classified briefing on H-405. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

I have consistently supported modernizing the existing FISA law to give our Government the tools it needs to identify and defeat terrorists in today's high-tech world, while at the same time preserving the freedoms and rights that define America. I have voted three times to pass legislation that would strengthen and modernize FISA and reaffirm the rule of law. Despite some improvements over previous attempts to update FISA, the bill considered by the House today regrettably falls short of achieving that critical balance. The rule of law lies at the core of America's founding principles, and the language in this bill was too weak to ensue that any breach of our laws that may have occurred under the warrantless wiretapping program will be fully addressed. It is not appropriate to deny Americans the right to pursue these matters in court, or to short-circuit the judicial review that lies at the heart of our system of checks and balances, which is the bedrock of our Constitution. Accordingly, I voted against this bill.

Mr. Speaker, today, this body once again considered legislation to provide funding for the ongoing military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the final analysis, this was one funding bill for two very distinct conflicts. In Afghanistan, the men and women of our military continue to perform an important mission by taking action against our enemies in the country that served as host to the Al Qaeda organization that attacked the United States of America on September 11th, 2001. The importance of the work they are doing with complete skill, courage, and professionalism has only been underscored by the recent resurgence of Taliban activity, which must be quelled. I am fully supportive of them and their mission. I have voted to provide funding solely for our military activities in Afghanistan, and would do so again if such a bill were to come before the House.

However the funding measure before us today also included funding for the war in Iraq without accompanying conditions on those funds or a timeline for withdrawal of American forces. I remain opposed to the President's mistaken war in Iraq, which has now claimed over 4,000 American lives, undermined our military and ability to respond to other threats abroad, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been used to meet pressing needs at home. The men and women in uniform serving in Iraq have performed brilliantly and heroically. It is time for the Iraqi government to take responsibility for Iraq and for America to start bringing our troops home. I cannot support the appropriation of additional funds without timelines that would begin to wind down our military involvement in Iraq, and therefore could not vote for that portion of the funding legislation considered by the House tonight.

However, I am pleased that I was able to vote for a separate piece of legislation tonight that addresses several important priorities here at home. Specifically, I am pleased that we were able to consider legislation to expand veterans educational benefits in order to honor the service of our men and women in uniform and give them every opportunity to succeed in life after they have served. Also included in this bill was a desperately needed extension of unemployment benefits that will help struggling middle class families weather the current economic storm. In addition, the piece of legislation that I was able to vote for this evening included a moratorium on six of the seven Medicaid regulations the Bush administration has unwisely decided to implement recently, I would have greatly preferred if the legislation prevented all seven regulations from coming into effect. Outpatient Graduate Medical Education is a vital component of medical education, and by disallowing Medicaid funding for it, this regulation will cost New York State as much as $300 million per year. On multiple occasions, both the House and Senate have passed a moratorium on all seven of these regulations overwhelmingly. I don't understand why we have decided to allow these unwise cuts to graduate medical education to continue now, when the votes exist to prevent it. However, I will continue to push for this final moratorium to be implemented and for this unwise rule to be overturned.

Thank you, Mr. Hodes. Good evening. It is a pleasure to be here again. I want to just agree with one thing that our previous speaker from the other side of the aisle, Mr. King, had to say regarding biofuels. I think that there are ways in which various biofuels, including corn, but especially cellulosic biofuels and nonfood crops can and should be used to extend the liquid fuels capacity of this country. But the main reason that I'm here tonight is because I've heard in the last several days a nonstop drum beat, a chorus singing from the same choir book and the same hymn book at every committee meeting I have been at, at every press conference I have heard, at every chance I see a Republican representative on television blaming the Democrats for the high price of gasoline and claiming, erroneously, that Democrats have been stopping drilling, that Democrats are opposed to drilling, and therefore we're responsible for the price of gas. This is not only false but ridiculous on the face of it. And I challenge it as a falsehood.

Specifically, I would say that over the last 8 years, the number of drilling permits issued by the government has gone up by 361 percent. So the lands are open. The oil companies own 9,700 plus leases that they have bid on and received the leases for. And as you say, Mr. Hodes, they have got done the environmental permitting on, the permits have been issued, and the way is clear for drills to go into the ground or into the offshore adjacent waters of the lower 48. But for some reason, no drilling is occurring.

Now I'm curious as to why exactly that is, if really the oil companies want to drill. And I would remind you, by the way, that our President George W. Bush said, when oil was going for $50 a barrel, that that was all the incentive the oil companies need. They don't need any more tax breaks or incentives. Fifty dollars a barrel is enough incentive to make them drill anywhere.

As this chart will show you, the total Federal acres leased and in production in 2007 were 91.5 million acres leased but producing only 23.7 million acres. There is a huge discrepancy between land that has been leased by the oil companies and that which they are using to actually drill and produce oil. Why is this? Could it be perhaps that they expect that speculators and market forces may drive the prices up further, not to mention their restricting supply might drive them up further, and that if they hold off for a couple more years, that same land and that same oil might be more valuable? And actually when you're making profits such as the gentleman from New Hampshire just talked about, I mean, how much money can you deal with? How many profits can you possibly figure out what to do with and where to invest in? And maybe it's better leaving them in the ground.

If I'm an oil company, I'm not necessarily thinking in the national interest. I'm thinking in the interests of my shareholders for the next quarter, for the next year, for the next shareholders' meeting, and for my next bonus if I'm the CEO. We had the CEOs of the top five oil companies testifying in this House before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. And when they were asked, ``Now that you have made the record profits of any corporation in the history of the world, would you commit to investing in one biofuels pump at every station that you own?'' And they said ``no.'' And when they were asked, ``If you would commit to advertising now that you have made the biggest profits in the history of the world for 3 years in a row, would you invest in advertising to tell people to conserve more and that it's patriotic to conserve and to drive a more fuel-efficient car and so on?'' And they said, ``Oh, we're already doing that.'' Which I frankly haven't seen. I watch enough television. I think I would have noticed if they were doing that.

And my friend, Mr. Walden, a minority member, a Republican member of the Select Committee from Oregon said, ``I'm a capitalist.'' I'm paraphrasing him now. I don't remember the exact quote. ``I'm a capitalist. I'm a small businessman myself. And if I made record profits for several years in a row, profits that I hadn't even dreamed of, I would start to think about whether I could lower my price to my customer. Have you at the oil companies thought about lowering the prices to the consumers?'' And one by one all five of them said, ``Well, we don't set the prices.'' And there was a chuckle through the room.

But I think there are various factors setting the prices. And one of them is collusion between the oil companies, which is why I have called for an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on exactly that fact, the fact that when crude oil goes up on the world market, the gas and diesel price spikes immediately with it. They go up simultaneously. But when crude prices go down, gasoline prices still go up. And if they come down at all, they come done slowly. It's kind of like rockets and feathers. The price goes up like a rocket, and it comes down like a feather very slowly.

So I'm suspicious about a couple of things, one, the disconnect between crude and refined gasoline when they're coming down. They're connected when going up. They are not connected when coming down. Secondly, why so much leased acreage that is not being drilled on? And thirdly, why at this time when the prices are at a record, when America's families are being squeezed and hurt, and their budgets are being hurt, they're being forced to choose between food, medicine or gasoline, some people have given up their jobs because they can't afford to commute to those jobs, why at these times are these oil companies and our friends on the other side of the aisle choosing to put the pressure on and say drill in ANWR and drill in these environmentally sensitive areas?

By the way, two of the individuals who have been stopping offshore drilling, I haven't personally stopped any myself, but two of the people who have

are the President's brother, Jeb Bush, who is the Republican Governor of Florida who is opposed to drilling off the coast of Florida, and Governor Schwarzenegger of California, a Republican Governor who has been opposed to further drilling off the coast of California. So you can't just say this is a Democratic opposition even if we were opposing it.

But the fact is that we have seen an increase, a radical increase in leases that are made available, in leases that the oil companies bid for apparently believing there is something of value underground, 9,700 separate leases and 68 million acres of land currently available and not being used. And I suggest that our friends in the minority might think of another reason, or perhaps another policy, that would help us get out of the box we're in.

We have worked very hard in this Congress to try to develop new sources, to provide incentives and tax breaks and subsidies for renewable energies like solar, wind and geothermal and various kinds of biofuels. For the first time, we made a major investment of, I believe it was $6 billion or so in carbon sequestration so we can use the record amounts of coal that we have and still precipitate out the carbon so we don't release that carbon dioxide that causes the global warming.

And, by the way, I would say in sympathy to the folks from Mr. King's State and to the parents of the five Boy Scouts who were killed by a tornado there, and in sympathy to the folks in Cedar Rapids who are just now starting to pump out their basements and put their city back together, it used to be called the city ``that would never flood,'' by the way, that was under 12 feet of water from its most recent flood, in sympathy to the poor citizens of Myanmar who were struck by the cyclone a couple of weeks ago that was as strong as Hurricane Katrina but came to shore with no warning and no FEMA, and not even Brownie to save them, and in sympathy to the people in Georgia and in Florida with record droughts, and in sympathy to people of the Rocky Mountain States and the Western States with record fire seasons, and in sympathy to folks in the 19th District of New York, which I represent which has had three 50-year floods in the last 5 years, I would say in sympathy to all those folks and to protect them, that global warming is here, it is starting to change the climate. These extreme weather patterns fit the computer models of global warming. And if we want to pump and drill more oil and burn more fossil fuels, fine. But that had better not be our only solution, or we will see more tornadoes, more floods, more extreme weather catastrophic events and more global warming. And I think that is not what the American people want. What we want are fair gas prices, fair energy prices and a green, renewable, sustainable energy future.

I yield back to my friend from New Hampshire.

Thank you, Mr. Hodes.

As you were speaking, I was thinking about some of the things that we can do.

Westchester County, one of the counties that I have the honor to represent, has a loop of county bus service which has switched from diesel buses to biodiesel buses to hybrid biodiesel buses.

We have John Jay High School, at which I just spoke a couple of days ago, where the environmental club has a grease mobile, a diesel car they've converted to run on biodiesel that they made from cooking oil from restaurants in the area.

The Newburgh Free Academy, a public school in Orange County, New York, one of the counties I'm honored to represent, has a solar racing club that built a solar car which tied for first place in a race between Houston, Texas and Newburgh, New York. They were built without the faculty advisors' even touching the vehicle. The adults were not allowed to touch the vehicle. The kids had to build it by themselves. These students knew how to weld and fasten the car together and how to build it sturdily enough and how to make sure that the wheels rotated so that they didn't wobble and so on. The advanced placement math and science students knew how to calculate how many square inches of photovoltaic cells it took to power a certain number of batteries to drive the wheels.

They drove that car from Houston for 2,000 miles to Newburgh, New York, and tied for first place in a race that was sponsored by a corporation that put the money up for the entire educational and research experiment.

When we did a presentation in our district on this, the students came in, wearing their solar racing club hats and their solar racing club T- shirts, and they showed the video of their car rolling down the highway with nothing but solar power powering it. By the way, this was a standing-room-only crowd who came to see this at the Bedford Town Hall in New York.

Afterwards, the adults came up to me as we were leaving, and they were saying, if these kids can do this on a shoestring, with no budget to speak of, where is Detroit? Why can't GM and Ford and Chrysler, our automakers, do this?

I would say that they can and that they should have been, but they're only now starting to. In fact, as to the Chevy Volt, as advertised on their Web site--it will be out, I believe, next year--they're planning this car to be a plug-in hybrid which will have a small internal combustion engine, but it will not be connected to the drive chain. The gas engine will only be used to drive a generator to keep the Lithium- ion batteries fully powered. When you drive this car, they say, on a 100-mile commute or less, it will run as an electric vehicle and will not use any gasoline. When you run it on an intercity trip of hundreds of miles, it will average 150 miles per gallon. That's supposed to be available next year.

I was at an event last week, and I talked to somebody from Toyota. They said, oh, that's nothing. In a couple of years, we're bringing out a car that's going to get 500 miles to the gallon.

Now, my feeling is that, when I was growing up and when we were in the middle of the space race and when President John Kennedy had challenged us that we would get to the Moon in 10 years, in our country, we were used to the position of leadership, and we thought, certainly, the United States has the ingenuity and the creativity and the expertise and the intelligence to be able to devise solutions for all of these problems. I still think we can, and I think we need to, and I think that the solution here is not to drill, drill, drill, and to open up more environmentally sensitive areas to be destroyed.

By the way, it was interesting to me that the polar bear was just put on the threatened list by the Secretary of the Interior. Then just this week, with a rulemaking process that doesn't have to go before us here in Congress, Secretary Kempthorne issued a rule indemnifying the top seven oil companies against any legal action should they kill polar bears in their exploration for oil.

So it's kind of a curious environmental consciousness that this administration seems to have where they give lip service to it on one hand, but on the other hand, they want to protect their friends in the oil companies from any risk at all at the same time that they open them up to all profit imaginable.

Just turning to this chart, natural gas is, of course, another one of the things we hear about, the oil and gas for which we bad Democrats are not allowing them to drill. Currently, how much natural gas is open to leasing? 82 percent. Closed to leasing is this small piece of the pie chart. This came from the Minerals Management Service in 2006. Technically, of the recoverable reserves of natural gas, 82 percent of them are open to leasing. This corresponds with the figures that we've been talking about in terms of oil that is open to leasing and that, in fact, has been leased and that is not currently being used.

I would contrast that with the inventiveness of Listening Rock Farm in my district, which is in the town of Amenia, New York. It's, actually, just barely north of my district. It's a renewable tree farm that's making biodiesel from wood waste and is running all their farm vehicles--their tractors and other vehicles and their road vehicles--on biodiesel made from wood waste, which is wood chips, sawdust, leaves, anything that doesn't go into the furniture that they make.

I would contrast it with Taylor Biomass, which is a company in Orange

County that is a private corporation but that takes municipal solid waste currently from the Town of Montgomery on a pilot project. They separate out the batteries and the solvents and the Raid and the insecticides and other bad things that you don't want to go into the groundwater or up into the air, and those things get taken away and are dealt with in a responsible way. What is left is gasified and burned to spin a turbine and to put kilowatts out into the grid and, at the same time, to produce ethanol. These are creative solutions to our energy problems that, I think, must be explored.

One thing I would share with our friend Mr. King is that we need to look at a wide variety of different kinds of energy around different parts of the country but, in particular, in the northeast where we have a hilly topography. There are many opportunities for small, low-head, hydroelectric power. In New York alone, the Department of Energy's Web site--the Idaho National Laboratory page--lists 4,000-some, low-head hydro sites, meaning small dams and small waterfalls, where, according to them, no lefty, environmental, tree-hugging organization--this is our DOE that we're talking about now--says that if we just put turbines where the water is already falling at these 4,000-some sites of low- head hydro potential that we could generate greater than 1,200 megawatts of power. That's about 60 percent of the output, the full output of the two Indian Point nuclear plants in my district. That's just for contrast.

Lastly, I would say that I'm interested that Texas recently passed the State of California as the State with the largest installed wind- power capacity. They have now become the leading wind generation State in the country. The reason, in part, is that Governor George W. Bush, when he was Governor of Texas, signed a renewable energy standard requiring that 10 percent of all electricity in Texas be generated by renewable sources of power.

Of course, once the industry knew that that was there, that was a requirement they had to meet, they more than met it, they exceeded it. They had passed California and became the top wind-power electric producer that T. Boone Pickens, one of the original oil tycoons in this country, was quoted recently as saying that he is more excited today about wind power than he ever was about any oil field he ever discovered.

The odd part of this picture is that now that George W. Bush is President of the United States, he threatened to veto our energy bill last year if it included a renewable energy standard in it. What was good for Texas, for some reason when he was President, wasn't good for the whole country.

Now, I wish that he would revisit that or explain it to us, but I believe that the same thing that was good for Texas would be good for the whole country. It doesn't have to be wind everywhere. It just has to be renewable. Some places will be wind, some places might be low- head hydro, some places might be biofuels, some places might be tidal power or wave power, but all of these things are available.

There are test programs and pilot programs that show they are effective. The sooner we start using them, the sooner we can get off this dependence on foreign oil and start to put our economy back to work and create new jobs and the new businesses, new technologies, here at home.

I yield back to my friend.

Well, I have a couple of comments. One is there is a bill that will be, I believe it's already been introduced, but we are going to be talking about more tomorrow called the Responsible Federal Oil and Gas Lease Act of 2008 introduced by Representatives Rahall, Markey, Hinchey, Emanuel and Yarmuth, among others, I am cosponsor as well, as are you, I believe.

What this will do, it's called, the slang version is the ``Use It or Lose It Act,'' which would compel oil and gas companies to either produce on those 9,700 leases that they have and those 68 million acres of land that they have already leased, either produce or give up those leases that they are stockpiling, and it would do this by barring the companies from obtaining any more leases unless they can demonstrate that they are producing oil and gas or diligently developing the leases they already hold during the initial term of those leases. The bill directs the Secretary of the Interior to define what constitutes diligent development.

By the way, the backdrop for this, the sort of origin for it, is that back a while in history, coal went through the same kind of speculation, where Federal coal resources were being abused, potential coal exploration areas were being leased by the coal companies, and speculation was driving the price up before that coal was actually developed.

Some people think that, and this is people in the financial markets as well as the energy markets believe that a significant portion, maybe as much as 25 percent in the increase in the cost of gasoline is actually speculation, people saying, well, that's a good place to put my money. I guess the stock market is kind of uncertain, and real estate has taken a hit lately.

Of course, I am not sure which commodities to invest in, but, oil, that looks like it's always going up. No matter what happens, I think I will put my money into oil. Of course, the more people that do buy oil futures, the more the price of oil goes up on the world market, and the more we wind up paying at the pump.

Companies which lease Federal coal resources are, already by law, required to diligently develop those leases. That's the result of this speculation in the past. The requirement has discouraged the rampant speculation that once did exist in the Federal coal leasing program. This same type of speculation now appears to be plaguing the oil and gas leasing program.

So under the Use It or Lose It bill, the Responsible Federal Oil and Gas Lease Act of 2008, oil and gas companies would have to either produce on those leases or give them up. I think that this is in the national interest, I think it's fair, because certainly the application for lease of a particular plot, whether it be onshore or offshore for production of oil or natural gas, implies that that company was intending to develop that resource.

And the Department of the Interior has I believe the right and the duty to make sure that our country's natural resources are used for the best and higher good of the people of this country. Not the CEOs or the stockholders of those corporation, but every American citizen, every person in the United States whose future depends on this economy and on the energy choices we make.

That's all I wanted to say, but I wanted to ask my friend from New Hampshire, since you have that lovely chart next to you, I wonder if you can comment on the Republican leadership's voting record on legislation that pertains to gas prices.

Madam Speaker, over the weekend, gas reached the $4 national average for the first time in our Nation's history. The majority in Congress has worked to combat these prices by advancing new energy solutions and efforts to protect consumers. The standard refrain from the oil companies and their allies is, ``We need to drill for more oil here at home.'' I would ask them, ``Who is stopping you?''

The oil company myth is that we need to open up the Arctic refuge and give the oil company a free hand to go wherever and whenever they want to chase oil. The reality, however, is that about 75 percent of the oil in the United States is on land that is already open for production, but less than one-third of that land is actually being used by the oil companies.

They are literally sitting on 10,000 permits and millions of acres of leased land that would let them start pulling more oil out of the ground here at home. So I say to the oil company advocates, start drilling for more domestic supply. Start drilling on the lands that are already open, and stop posturing while American drivers are in pain at the pump.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall Nos. 391 and 392, I did not receive a page. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' and ``yea.''

I thank the gentleman from New York.

In the Hudson Valley, in my district, gas prices have reached crisis levels where commuting is a daily part of life and small businesses need to move their products. The record-setting spikes in gas prices have been a drain on family budgets and our entire economy.

There is, unfortunately, no silver bullet solution to our gas and oil challenge, but I am proud that Congress has taken aggressive action to provide desperately needed relief. We have passed a once in a generation increase in fuel economy standards, pushed for more development of cellulosic biofuels, and continue to advance legislation that would provide tax incentives for people to purchase fuel incentive vehicles and help us break the grip of OPEC on our economy.

The need for relief is real and urgent, and we have also taken steps to provide near-term assistance. The House has passed a bill to beef up the Department of Justice's ability to pursue antitrust action in the oil sector, and we have also passed legislation that requires the President to stop taking oil off the market to put in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, so that more supply is available on the market to lower prices. That was 70,000 barrels of oil a day that was being taken off the market that we passed in a bipartisan way. I am sure my friends across the aisle remember voting with us on that bill.

When market relief does arrive, however, we need to make sure that the individual American driver benefits, not just the oil companies. There is the old proverbial question about whether a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it actually makes a sound. I don't know about that, but I do know a drop in oil prices that doesn't cut prices at the pump is the same as no price drop at all.

Unfortunately, that is what we have been seeing. Over the past week, the price of crude oil has actually dropped by several dollars per barrel, offering the hope that the edge would be taken off the record high gas prices we have been facing. One look at the local price figures at your gas station is enough to know it has not happened.

On April 1, the price of crude oil was just over $100 per barrel and kept soaring, reaching $135 per barrel during trading on May 22. Over the same period of time, the national average price of gasoline rose from just under $3.29 to just over $3.83 a gallon. In New York, prices increased by over 60 cents from just over $3.40 to almost $4.02 a gallon.

Despite the fact that as of 2 days ago crude prices had dropped below $123 a barrel, retail gasoline prices are still at record levels. Nationwide, the average price of regular gasoline stayed at $3.98, and in New York the average price remained at the astronomical level of $4.17 per gallon. These represent increases of about 15 cents per gallon at the pump during the same period in which crude oil prices were declining.

Apparently, the old adage that what goes up must come down does not apply for the oil companies. That is a cause of great concern, and I have asked the Federal Trade Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to investigate this disconnection between the price of oil on the world market and the price of refined product at the pump.

Drivers are expected to share, in fact are forced to share, in the pain of oil and gas increases immediately, and they should have the expectation that they will also share in the relief just as quickly when the world oil price comes down. In a market this complex, it is imperative for the government to be an active protector of consumer rights and take swift measures to ensure that conditions are not exploited to the detriment of working families. By doing so, I believe we can make sure that any drop in crude prices will also mean real relief at the pump.

I thank the gentleman, Mr. Lampson, and Mr. Speaker, it's an honor again to be here on the floor of the House of Representatives, but it's kind of another sad moment to think that the price of oil went to an unthinkable level again today, cresting over $129 per barrel.

Gas prices have more than doubled since 2001, and today, the average gas price in my State of New York is over $4. Oil dependence has become an untenable burden on our economy and a threat to our national security.

Skyrocketing gas prices we see climbing each day threaten to break family budgets that are already being devoured by the price of food, health care, higher education and consumer goods.

Breaking the grip of OPEC and Big Oil is something that our country must do to thrive and to survive in the 21st century. It's a big job that will take some time, and I'm proud to be here tonight to discuss one of the innovative solutions that the majority and this Congress is working on, the Invest in Energy Independence Act, which I'm proud to be a cosponsor of, and I thank my friend for cosponsoring and offering that bill.

I was talking to another Member at the back of the body when we were taking votes I think a few days ago and talking about this very thing. And you came up and said I happen to have a bill that addresses this problem of the Strategic Reserve absorbing 70,000 barrels a day over and over, day after day, taking them off the market, and creating that much more demand which is helping to drive up the price of oil.

This bill creates a win-win scenario for the American taxpayer. By redirecting through the release of oil from the SPR and restructuring its stockpile, the bill would help to put oil supply on the market to quell prices at the pump in the short-term, and this would also result in revenue to the Federal Government that does not come from increased taxes, which could be used to capitalize a fiscally responsible result and make sure that we take a more permanent action to end our oil addiction. We can't, as many of us have said, drill our way out of our problems.

The bill would invest that revenue in innovative research to develop clean, domestic sources of energy to power our economy. Ending our dependence on foreign oil has to be a top national priority, and to do so, we have to use every tool at our disposal.

Until recently, this administration has been violating the fundamental principle of buy low and sell high by taking oil off the market to fill the SPR at a time when prices were breaking new records and supplies were tight. Smart management of the SPR along the lines called for in Mr. Lampson's bill can make the reserve a powerful weapon in our battle against foreign oil dependence, and I strongly support you in this measure.

If the gentleman would yield?

Thank you for asking that question.

If you read the comments by T. Boone Pickens on the front page of the

New York Times and other newspapers and magazines recently, he, one of the original oil tycoons and more successful ones, has said that he's more excited now about wind power than he is about any oil field he ever discovered.

Now, all people might not share his excitement. I talked to Ted Turner, who's been a media mogul and then head of record companies, broadcasting companies, Time Warner/AOL, I believe. I remember him back when he was sailing America's Cup yachts. He's certainly been around the world for a while. But today he said the thing he's most excited about as an investor and as a businessman is solar power.

And I see these men and women who have experience and have been observing commodities and observing economies and observing the way the world works and the direction it's going looking not just at drilling. I mean, obviously we're not going to get out of our dependence or our use of oil or liquid fuels anytime soon, especially for aviation.

As a member of the Aviation Subcommittee, I'm keenly aware of the fact that we might be able to move to electric vehicles, to hybrid, gas-electric or ethanol-electric or biodiesel hybrid, plug-in hybrid vehicles, et cetera, and combine these other technologies on the ground. But when we're talking about aircraft, especially I would say our Air Force, our military aircraft, we need to be able to develop and conserve liquid fuels and liquid petroleum fuels for those purposes and not burn them unnecessarily on the ground that we could use other technologies for.

So I would say that I agree to a point and I disagree to another point. The other problem with petroleum-based, carbon-based, fossil fuel technologies is that they're also emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and accentuating the kind of climate change that we've seen.

I would say climate change resonates more with people than global warming, especially on a day like today in Washington where it's cool for late May. But we've seen the cyclone in Myanmar. We've seen the almost biblical flooding in Arkansas and Missouri and parts of our Midwest. My district in upstate New York has seen three 50-year floods in the last 5 years. We've seen Hurricane Katrina. We have seen droughts in the South and wildfires in Florida right now. We've seen the last couple of summers devastating fire seasons in the Western States and the Rocky States.

So, it's not just that the climate will be getting warmer and the glaciers or sea ice in the Arctic are disappearing but that the extremes of all kinds of weather, be they rain events or drought events, be they hot spells or cold spells, be they low pressure systems that turn into bigger tornados or bigger hurricanes or cyclones, that's what the computer models project. And the more we burn oil, the more we push ourselves down that road.

So, it helps us in a number of ways to look at these alternatives. First of all, for domestic, they are not sending our money overseas by the billions, especially borrowed money that we are getting from countries like China or Japan or other countries we're already hugely in debt to. They don't cause asthma and emphysema and acid rain and oil spills. They don't cause us to possibly be drawn into wars in unstable countries in unstable parts of the world that just happen to have oil.

So it's a win-win-win-win situation. Whether or not you believe that the climate is changing, the fact of the matter is if you can create jobs and create new technologies and new industries here in the United States, get us out of our balance of trade deficit and make the atmosphere cleaner at the same time, I'm happy.

And I think a lot of Americans would be happy, too. I think it solves so many problems that it's clearly the direction our policy should be moving in. And I yield back.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

In New York, in my district, as you suggest, there are a number of very exciting developments going on. We have a private business in Orange County, New York, which is currently taking all the solid waste on a pilot program, municipal solid waste--garbage, trash--not burning it, as the old incineration model would have us do, but separating it, pulling out the recyclables, pulling out the batteries and the cans of insecticide and the toxic substances that might be considered to be household hazardous waste, which, if you were to burn them, they would cause dioxin and heavy metals to go up the stack, and basically pollutants that can harm us and our children. Those things get pulled out and recycled. And what's left after the magnetic field pulls up the ferrous metals and magnetic metals and the shaker grate drops out the dirt and the stones, and so on, you're left with a combination of paper waste, wood waste, food waste, agriculture waste, all of which is gasified with hot sand as a catalyst under a patented process. And then that gas is used to spin a turbine and send, I believe, a couple of megawatts it is that they're generating out into the grid.

But the interesting thing about it is that the global warming gas emissions, the greenhouse gas emissions from this process are 75 percent less than if they put the same material in a landfill, which is what the town of Montgomery was doing before and what cities like New York City are doing. They're trucking municipal solid wastes, since the Fresh Kills landfill closed on Staten Island, to other States and buying space in landfills that are willing to accept it. And it's not cheap, especially with diesel and the price that it costs now, it's not cheap to send a roll-off truck with trash in it--or thousands of them a day--from a city like New York out to Ohio or Pennsylvania or wherever the latest landfill is, and then coming back empty, burning diesel fuel the whole way and sending those emissions into the air, too.

And when that material in the landfill decomposes, when the plant and vegetable matter decomposes, it creates methane, which is released through those J-shaped vents. If you drive past a landfill in your travels and you see those vents like upside-down

Js, what they're releasing into the atmosphere is methane. Methane is 20 times worse than carbon dioxide in terms of its greenhouse gas global warming impact.

So here's one idea, one project that can produce electricity, that can produce ethanol by the thousands of gallons, that can strip hydrogen, which is 48 percent of the gas that they produce out to charge hydrogen fuel cells, and it gets rid of municipal solid waste at 75 percent reduction in the greenhouse gas emission. So, very inventive project.

And I would say, at the other end of the spectrum, in terms of not just the size of the operation, but the funding that came to play, Newburgh High School in Newburgh, New York, Orange County, on the west bank of the Hudson, has a solar racing team which built a solar-powered car. They came to one of our workshops we did in the district on solar energy, it was packed--as all of our alternative energy forums are packed by people wanting to know what they can do. But the kids on the solar racing team included kids from the BOCES program, who are on the vocational track. And they knew how to weld and how to put together a car that would not fall apart on the road. And they included the advanced placement math students, who knew how to calculate how many square inches of photovoltaic cells they needed in order to generate the watts necessary so that they could power this vehicle, and the battery capacity.

And it looked about the size of this table here. It's actually an oval shape, maybe a little bit bigger than this, like a soapbox derby racer. And the student who drove it crouched down inside and had a little windshield in front of him to keep the bugs out of his face. And they won, or actually tied for first place, in a race from Houston, Texas to Newburgh, New York. Two thousand miles of this country they traveled with a top speed of 55 miles per hour. And when they showed up at our forum wearing ``Solar Racing Team'' hats and ``Solar Racing Team'' t-shirts and showing a video and the slide show of their car rolling across the highways from Texas to New York, the adults in the audience were so excited I think it woke up the little kid in them. They could hear about all the well-funded, high-science, high- technology things, but to see that these kids, with virtually no resources--the teacher adviser from the school was not allowed to touch the vehicle, it was entirely built by the kids. And the fact that they were high school students and were able to do this, even on a test, a display pilot project kind of scale, to build a vehicle that would do 2,000 miles, that would reach speeds of 55 miles per hour powered entirely on solar power and storing that power in batteries, the adults, as they were leaving, were asking me, why can't Detroit do this? And I answered, well, I think they can, but they're not.

And what we're trying to do through this bill, among other things, is to provide the incentives--and tomorrow, by the way, the House will pass sweeping tax incentives to provide not just corporations, but consumers, as well as businesses, with extended incentives for hybrid plug-ins for wind, solar, biofuels and marine energy.

And I know that there has been great concern around the country, and I've heard it from people in my district, about these renewable energy tax credits being extended. And what we're trying to do by doing that is to make it possible, not just for students in a high school, but for those who run our automobile manufacturing companies to be able to build cars that use these new technologies.

And with that, I yield back to the gentleman.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank you for your comments. And I would add to what you say, as I look at $100 million for ARPA-E, including $50 million for university research, $15 million for wind--and congratulations to you and the State of Texas on passing California in becoming the number one wind energy State in the country with more installed wind capacity than any of the other 49 States. By the way, I have to thank our President, George W. Bush, who signed a renewable energy standard when he was Governor of Texas, and that's partly why the wind is being exploited in Texas to the extent it is. I only wish that he would change his mind and sign the same renewable energy standard for the entire country now that he is President of the entire country.

But I look at this and the $30 million for solar and the $100 million for weatherization, et cetera, et cetera, and you know what I think of? Jobs. I think of jobs because when you put $100 million into weatherization of low-income housing, and I'm speaking as one who used to live in New York City, although I now live in Dutchess County in the Hudson Valley, there are so many old buildings in every city in this country that are poorly insulated, that have no storm windows or storm doors, that are leaky, that are leaking cool air in the summer when they're being air conditioned and leaking heat during the winter when there's actually a heating unit running, and what are you hiring? You're hiring trade people. You're hiring sheet metal workers. You're hiring carpenters. You're hiring installers. And in the process, you're saving barrels of oil or kilowatts, and a barrel of oil saved or a kilowatt saved has less environmental impact than any way you can generate a new barrel or a new kilowatt. So it's the cheapest way of getting a barrel or a kilowatt, and it also has the least environmental impact. So I'm very happy about the weatherization component of this.

Marine/hydrokinetic, we in New York are aware of the work that's been done recently by Verdant, Inc., a company that has been doing a test on six hydroturbines that are running below water in the East River, east of Roosevelt Island. As Long Island Sound, the western half, drains out through East River, under the Throgs Neck and the Whitestone and the Triborough Bridge, alongside the UN down the East River past Manhattan Island and through New York and out under the Verrazano-Narrows, half of Long Island Sound, millions of tons of water every day twice going out into the ocean and then back in through the harbor again. And that's what's being done by the action of the moon's gravitational effect on the ocean. And the fact that we are not harnessing that is just absurd. And their biggest problem, Verdant, Inc., in terms of putting in a hydrokinetic-generating station that use these turbines, there's so much force at work in the East River that it kept breaking the blades off the turbines, and they had to use titanium instead of steel and lessen the pitch so that there wasn't quite so much force on them to keep the turbines intact. Now, they're going back in, I believe, this year with a second round of more highly refined generators to test it again, but it's obvious that the power is there, whether it be wave action or whether it be tidal action or any of the other renewables that we are talking about. And if we can transition ourselves to these with whatever liquid fuels like, for instance, ethanol, I know that there are some problems with ethanol, but there's a surplus right now of ethanol in this country. I checked on the Internet last week. I just did a little Internet search and found that it's selling, as of the middle of last week, for $1.97 a gallon. That's half the cost of gasoline.

We had somebody call our office in Upstate New York, in Carmel, Putnam County, a woman constituent, who said, ``I'm so excited. I just bought a flex-fuel vehicle. Where can I get some flex-fuel?'' And my staff had to tell her there are two pumps in all of New York where you can buy flex-fuel. Well, West Point which is in my district, the United States Military Academy at West Point, where, I'm proud to say, my nephew is a cadet, just announced at our Board of Visitors meeting last week that they are planning to put in a 5,000 gallon underground tank for ethanol so that they can carry flex-fuel E-85 in the motor pool and at the commissary and start with a big quantity that's going to be used by that community of faculty and graduates and West Pointers who still live around the academy.

I don't know how much time we have left, my friend, but I just wanted to say once again

that I support the Invest in Energy Independence Act and am doing my best to convince more Members of this body on both sides of the aisle to support it. I believe that it will help to ease market tensions. It will help to keep the price of gasoline from rising too much higher and hopefully eventually to bring it back to more affordable levels by providing competition with other kinds of fuels and other kinds of energy.

And when that day arrives, Mr. Lampson, when that day arrives that we can tell the Saudis or the Russians or whichever country it is that's shipping imported oil into this country ``No thank you, you can turn your tanker around and send it somewhere else,'' that day a big weight will lift off the shoulders of America, off the American public. And I believe it will be a moment similar to the day when we first landed on moon.

Because I was a kid when Sputnik was launched, and I remember the feeling of this thing. It was beeping overhead, that the Russians had gotten to it first. And it didn't really do anything other than beep. But the fact it was there above us was symbolic of, we thought and we probably were right, a technological breakthrough that another country had made that put them for the time being ahead of us in that field. And I believe that we can't afford to let Japan or China or any other country get more of a lead in energy than the one that exists now. And the day that we are once again able to throw our shoulders back, hold our heads high, and say that we can fuel our own economy and our own industry and our own recreation and our own family's trips to and from work and from school and so on without depending on some other country that might have policies and human rights or other things that we don't like but we have to sort of bow to them and ignore that aspect of foreign policy because we need something that they have, that will be not just energy independence, it will be independence.

We're talking about sovereignty here, and I think that will be a day that Americans together, regardless of party or no party at all, if they're paying attention, all Americans on that day will be proud to be Americans. Not that we aren't proud now, but we will be proud of an accomplishment that will be uniquely American and something that I believe we will accomplish and that we have to look forward to.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to express my admiration and support for the brave men and women of our military who are nobly serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, they continue to perform an important mission by taking action against our enemies in the country that served as host to the Al Qaeda organization that attacked the United States of America on September 11th, 2001, and they do so with complete skill, courage, and professionalism. I am fully supportive of them and their mission. I have voted to provide funding solely for our military activities in Afghanistan, and would do so again if such a bill were to come before the House.

However, the funding measure in Amendment Number 1 brought before the House today included funding for the ongoing war in Iraq without accompanying conditions on those funds or a timeline for withdrawal of American forces. I remain opposed to the President's mistaken war in Iraq, which has now claimed over 4,000 American lives, undermined our military and ability to respond to other threats abroad, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been used to meet pressing needs at home. I believe that we must change course in Iraq, and cannot support the appropriation of additional funds without measures to impose conditions on that funding and start bringing our troops home. Accordingly, I could not vote for Amendment Number 1.