Floor Statements

Well, the Grand Old Oil Party has a case of collective amnesia. They would hope that the American people will share in their amnesia. The American people should forget that for 6 years they controlled everything, the House, the White House and the Congress. And for 6 years they labored and they brought forth the Bush-Cheney energy policy. I voted against it, as did most Democrats. We said it would make us even more dependent upon Saudi Arabia--one of the President's best friends here, the King of Saudi Arabia--and it has. It has worked exactly as they designed.

Now they're born again into caring about other forms of energy and energy independence and American consumers. It's just a smoke screen to cover for their continued addiction to the contributions of the oil industry and to fighting for the oil industry to continue that addiction.

We're bringing forward a bill to break that dependence, to break the enslavement to OPEC, and to move this country toward true energy independence on domestic resources and new technologies and jobs. I don't think anybody believes that they really care about the American consumers.

I thank the gentlelady for yielding.

If you listen to the Republicans here today, you would think that Detroit can't make more efficient automobiles, something the Republicans blocked for 12 years, which we did within the first year of taking back power here in the House.

They are saying that our electric generators can't produce 15 percent, one-sixth of their energy from renewable resources. In the United States of America in the 21st century, we can't get 15 percent from renewables? We have to rely on fossil fuels?

Do you believe that they say that the oil companies can't afford to pay the American taxpayers fair royalties for the nonrenewable resources they are extracting from our Federal land? If you do believe all that, then you probably believe that they do have a plan for independence and energy sustainability for the future.

Now the gentleman there spoke earlier, the gentleman from Washington, a good friend, about a fig leaf hiding an embarrassing fact or problem. There is one huge fig leaf over this debate today, and here is what is under the fig leaf: George Bush, holding hands with the King of Saudi Arabia.

Now the Bush administration, last time I checked, same party affiliation as that side of the aisle, the Republicans, led by Vice President Cheney, last time I checked, a member of the Grand Old Oil Party, wrote an energy bill in secret. They pushed for it for 5 years.

When the Republicans controlled everything, the House, the Senate and the White House, they jammed through their energy bill over the objections of many on our side of the aisle who said wait, no, this isn't a forward-looking energy policy. It's going to make us actually more dependent on imported oil, and it's going to make us more dependent on fossil fuels, and it's not going to give us a new energy future that the American people need. It's not going to make us more efficient, more sustainable and more affordable.

Now they are trying to hide that fig leaf. Now they have also talked about the price per gallon, that when Speaker Pelosi became Speaker almost 2 years ago, there has been a big run-up in prices.

Whoops. Here is when George Bush took office. Gas was about $1.45 a gallon; today, bumping back up, over $4 in some hurricane areas.

Now there is something else that goes along with that that they don't want to talk about, and this is what's really going on here, folks.

They want to talk about relief for American consumers. They don't give a fig leaf about relief for American consumers.

This is what the debate is all about. Look at the obscene growth in profits of the oil industry since the oil men in the White House, George Bush and Dick Cheney, took over; from $30 billion a year to $160 billion this year, every penny of that extracted from the pockets of American consumers and American business. An unbelievable, unprecedented breath-taking run-up in profits.

And they say now they are concerned and want a change. They don't really want a change. They don't want this to change. They want us to continue to be dependent on oil and foreign oil and, yeah, maybe a smidgeon more of domestic oil.

Now they have a few other whoppers out there today. They say no drilling in Alaska. Whoops, sorry, wrong, guys. Actually, this bill would push the industry to get off its rear and begin to extract oil from the former Naval Petroleum Reserve, renamed the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska by the Republican Congress and put out for leasing. It has been leased. Bill Clinton, in fact, did the first leases. But guess what, 10 years later not a drop of oil, even though the known reserves, and why was it the Naval Petroleum Reserve for 80 years, because we knew there was a pile of oil under there, a huge pool of oil under there, more than 10 billion barrels.

No one knows if there is any oil under the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, but they want to talk about the refuge. They don't want to talk about the fact that their friends in the hugely profitable oil industry have failed to extract any oil from the known 10 billion barrels of reserves in the Naval Petroleum Reserve Alaska.

This bill would push for production there, push them to connect it to the existing pipeline, and push them to bring that oil down to the lower 48.

As Members on my side said earlier, we need a transitional fuel. We need to enhance our oil supply; this bill would do that. We also need to go after natural gas in a much more robust way, a cleaner fuel, a fuel of which we have significantly more reserves here in the United States of America which we don't need to import if we develop those reserves. This bill would do that.

This bill would also reform royalties. It would end the party. The Minerals Management Service under the Bush administration was swapping oil or something for royalties, or maybe it was sex, drugs and rock and roll. This bill would reform that process.

This bill would bring back integrity, fiscal responsibility, and give us a sustainable, renewable and cleaner energy future. Vote for a new future, not the same old Big Oil, Grand Oil Party plan.

I thank the gentleman.

The oil and gas industry contributed $166 million to the Republicans since 1990, 75 percent of their political contributions. Fact: When President Bush took office, gas cost $1.47 a gallon. Today gas costs $3.79 a gallon in my district. Fact: In 2002, the oil companies made $30 billion in profits. In 2008, it's projected they will make an unbelievable record $160 billion in profits, every penny of that extracted from American consumers and American small businesses and borrowed from overseas, putting us in huge trouble.

The oil companies took care of their Republican cronies and the Republicans legislated on their behalf. When they controlled everything, the House, the White House and the Senate, they passed the so-called energy bill. It took them 5 years to write it. And they passed it. We're living with the consequences, which is the huge increase in profits and the huge increase in prices to consumers.

The choice is clear. Do we pass a bill written by Democrats who are not beholden to Big Oil, or do we pass another Republican bill, those who legislated this mess in the first place? Do we break our dependence on fossil fuels and mandate renewal energy, or do we ignore the ravages of global warming, drill, dig, burn and borrow our Nation to debt and dust?

Today I will vote for energy independence, sustainability and affordable energy prices. Many of my Republican colleagues will vote yet again for bigger oil company profits. Congratulations to the Grand Old Oil Party. They're very consistent.

Mr. Speaker, Duncan Hunter was mistakenly added to the list of cosponsors on H.R. 5977. I ask unanimous consent to have his name removed.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 6630) to prohibit the Secretary of Transportation from granting authority to a motor carrier domiciled in Mexico to operate beyond United States municipalities and commercial zones on the United States-Mexico border unless expressly authorized by Congress, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 6630.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Last Saturday, September 6, marked a dark day in the transportation history and the safety of the traveling public in the United States of America. It was the 1-year anniversary of the so-called cross-border demonstration project of the Department of Transportation under the Bush administration.

When this pilot program began, 1 year and 5 days ago, they assured us it would be a 1-year pilot. They further assured us that they would fully evaluate the program before opening our border to all Mexican trucks. Unfortunately, Secretary Peters, under the tutelage of the Bush administration, announced last month that they intend to continue the program for two more years.

You know, given the fact that they have ignored Congress' will on this issue repeatedly, I wasn't surprised. But I am outraged. I am outraged that the Bush administration, for political purposes, would jeopardize the safety of the traveling public in the United States of America.

Since the beginning of this idea in the Bush administration, there has been strong and bipartisan congressional objection to the program. There are a number of concerns regarding Mexico's less stringent or nonexistent regulations on hours of service, vehicle safety, driver training and licensing, their nonexistent commercial driver's license database, or the meaningless database that they contend is a registration of commercial driver's licenses, and the fact that there is not

one single certified drug testing laboratory in Mexico.

And I am further concerned that our government, under the leadership of the Bush administration, has said that, don't worry; they'll take care of all of these problems at the border. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will inspect every truck every time, or so they purport.

There are questions about whether or not they're delivering on that pledge. There are also certainly questions of diverting our already inadequate force of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration officials, officers to the border to just inspect the trucks of a few Mexican companies that want to drive long distance in the United States.

The House has already voiced opposition on the implementation of this pilot program in three separate pieces of legislation: H.R. 1773, the Safe American Roads Act of 2007, which the House passed in May 2007 by an overwhelming vote of 411-3, and we'll hear a little bit later from the author of that legislation.

Provisions were also included in the 2007 Iraq war supplemental spending bill to impose strict measures to ensure the pilot program adheres to safety and security guidelines.

And then finally, last December, Congress included a provision in the 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act to prohibit DOT from using funds to, unfortunately, using the Senate's language instead of ours, establish a cross-border motor carrier program. The Bush administration argues that it was already established and they are just continuing it. The legislation that the House had passed would not have allowed them to parse those words and to continue to violate what is the very clear intent to Congress, despite the bungling of the wording by the Senate.

Because of DOT's blatant disregard of congressional intent, I introduced this bill, H.R. 6630, in July, to ensure the Mexican truck pilot is terminated, and that the results are fully evaluated before the program is either expanded or continued, and to reassert the authority of Congress in this matter. So this is something that should be virtually noncontroversial in this House, this House having spoken previously on this issue, this House being, on a bipartisan basis, fully concerned with the safety of the traveling American public, unlike the administration.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Kansas (Mrs. Boyda).

I yield the gentlewoman an additional minute.

Mr. Speaker, I would yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Filner).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would like to point out that I believe that this is a long-standing desire on the part of both the President--whose name shall not be mentioned at least on the Republican side of the aisle--George W. Bush and other members of his administration. In fact, as early as December 26, 1996, the headline

of the Journal of Commerce, Texas, ``Governor Berates Clinton Over Delay in Border Opening.'' And then June 17, 1996, Texas Governor George W. Bush, now the President of the United States, issues a call for the start of NAFTA trucking.

George W. Bush has long been an advocate of fully opening the border. In fact, before 9/11 he wanted to move to a borderless state between the U.S. and Mexico. Security concerns overrode him there. But he's trying to do it with trucks.

And hand-in-glove with the President is Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters. Her track record on this is disingenuous at best, deceitful, or perhaps she perjured herself. She said in her Senate confirmation hearing, ``There are no immediate plans to pursue a pilot program.''

But since she made that statement, we find that while she was head of the Federal Highway Administration from 2001 to 2005, plans were well underway by the Bush administration to open the border. It was first raised in the fall of 2004 between former Secretary Mineta and Mexican Secretary Cerisola in November of 2004.

And in early 2005, DOT actually was crafting a proposal. In a document entitled, ``Implementing NAFTA's Commercial Motor Carrier access Provisions--A Pilot Approach,'' outlined early plans for pilot programming. And it said, ``The essence of a pilot would be to create a crack in the current impasse and allow the pressure of time, and most importantly, the Mexican carriers not participating in the pilot, to enlarge the crack, to a point that a complete liberalization of the border becomes a fait accompli.''

They used French despite their disdain for the French position of not invading Iraq.

However, you know, as I said, Ms. Peters contradicted that.

So what we have here is an administration that is dead set to defy the will of the United States Congress as expressed in a bipartisan way to protect the safety of the American traveling public and to prevent the continuation and/or expansion of this program.

We should, Mr. Speaker, pass this bill with hopefully a unanimous vote or near unanimous vote to send yet one last message to this Bush administration and the law defiers and the dissemblers downtown and tell them to bring this program to a halt as they promised. It would have halted on September 6, 2007.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, can you tell me about the remaining time?

Mr. Speaker, I had hoped to restrict this debate to the failings of the Republican Bush administration in protecting the safety of the American traveling public and the jobs of American truckers. Unfortunately, the gentlelady before us apparently has amnesia because she forgets that the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House for 6 years. And during those 6 years, Vice President Cheney wrote an energy policy in secret with the big oil companies.

George Bush walked hand-in-hand with the King of Saudi Arabia, and they designed a policy. That policy that was actually designed to make us more dependent on foreign oil rather than less, and many of us who opposed it then in the minority said this is not a solution to America's energy problems. You are going to make us more dependent on foreign oil, and we are, exactly as was designed by Vice President Cheney, endorsed by President Bush and passed by the Republican House and the Republican Senate. That's the energy policy we're living under, that.

Now, today, they're born again as defenders of the American consumers, and they pocket hundreds of millions--sorry, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in contributions from Big Oil. They want to rush forward yet again with a shortsighted policy while giving lip service to a long-term solution to our energy needs.

We will have a comprehensive bill on the floor later this week, and we will see where the Republicans really stand on this issues. Do they stand with the American people, with American consumers? Will they look forward to the future and finally freeing us from the trial and enslavement to the OPEC nations? We will see later this week.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

I have the right to close, and I will be the last speaker.

I thank the gentleman for returning to the subject at hand, which is the safety of the traveling public and American jobs which the Bush administration would disregard by continuing their pilot program, violating their promise to only continue the program as a pilot for 1 year, 1 year having expired last Saturday, further violating and ignoring the intent of the Congress which has on numerous occasions expressed concerns regarding this program and its effect on the traveling public.

So I would hope that, on a bipartisan basis, we can send a message to the Bush White House by passing this bill unanimously, or nearly unanimously, and say that the Congress cares about the safety of the traveling public. The Congress cares about the fact there's no meaningful commercial driver's license database in Mexico. We don't really know who these people are.

The Congress cares about the fact that there is no meaningful hours of service program in Mexico and that many of these drivers may be crossing the border fatigued to the point of endangering public safety.

The Congress cares about the fact that there is no certified drug testing laboratory in Mexico, no meaningful program of testing for drugs of truck drivers in Mexico.

The Congress cares about the potential for insurance fraud and other things as mentioned by our colleague from California (Mr. Filner).

And the Congress is determined that this administration, the administration of George W. Bush, this Republican administration, should stop violating the law and violating the law and jeopardizing the American public for their own ideological ends in their hope that they can pry this program open wide enough that a future Congress or a future administration won't be able to slam it shut again.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Madam Speaker, I wish to express my strong support for the passage of S. 2607, the DTV Transition Assistance Act, which will aid rural communities by ensuring that low power translators get the funding needed for digital equipment upgrades. This bipartisan legislation is critical to rural Americans that rely on over the air broadcast television as their main conduit to entertainment, news and even lifesaving information in emergency situations. That is why I joined with Representatives Walden and Boucher, the Co-Chairs of the DTV Caucus, in introducing similar legislation.

Under current law, $65 million has been set aside for the upgrade of low powered translators for the DTV transition. In Oregon alone there are over 400 stations that broadcast over these low powered translators. While this money has been set aside to assist in upgrading these translators, the wording of the statute did not allow the money to be spent until September of 2010, almost 2 years after the transition. This bill would make these funds available on the day of the transition in February of 2009. It would also give the NTIA the authority to use leftover funds from section 3008 of the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 for grants, contracts, and assistance programs to assist seniors, rural residents, and minorities.

The Digital Television transition is the most sweeping and fundamental change to the television landscape since the advent of color. The advent of color television however, did not require millions of Americans to buy a new television or converter box or risk losing their picture. That fact alone makes the transition to digital television in February of 2009 a tectonic shift in broadcast television.

While this bill is an important fix, many problems still remain. The auctioning off of the newly available spectrum being vacated due to the digital transition has made the government over $19 billion. Despite this massive

collection of funds, the government has only allocated $5 million to educate the public about the transition, which is less than 0.03 percent of the $19 billion in revenue from the auction. The results have been as obvious as they have been preventable. A December 2007 survey by Consumer Reports found that 36 percent of respondents were completely unaware of the transition. How can we tell our constituents that we did everything we could when we spent next to nothing on educating them about the transition?

Instead the Bush Administration has privatized the outreach aspect of the transition, relying on private industry to inform viewers. The results have led to a jumble of different messages from different industries, all looking to benefit from the transition. There are examples of public service announcements supposedly made to inform consumers about the transition instead being thinly veiled advertisements for their own products.

The problems do not stop there. With only a 90 day window to buy convertor boxes before their coupons expire, many rural customers are finding that many stores either do not carry any convertor boxes or they are not carrying a pass through capable converter box that the customer will need in order to get all of their channels. These customers should not be penalized because of where they live.

Madam Speaker, this bill is an important step but it is only a step. We must do more to ensure that when Americans wake up on February 17th 2009, they are not left in the dark.

Well, the GOP, the Grand Old Oil Party, is up to it again. Now, it is as if the first six years of the Bush administration never existed. The Republicans controlled the House, the White House, and the United States Senate.

Vice President Dick Cheney, at the President's behest, met secretly with the oil and gas industry and other energy producers and proposed an energy policy, a Republican energy policy. That policy was passed by the Republican House of Representatives, adopted by the Republican Senate, and signed by the Republican president. We have been living under it now for a couple of years, and it is having the predictable results. We are now more dependent upon foreign oil. And many of us who voted against that Republican energy policy said it was pushing the country in that direction. We are seeing prices jacked up to unbelievable levels. Many of us predicted at the time that the Bush/ Cheney Republican energy policy would have those results.

They didn't mandate increases in fuel standards. They didn't mandate development of alternative fuels. They had a few pretend things about hydrogen which was far enough off in the future that it didn't upset their benefactors in the oil industry because they know hydrogen is 20, 30 years off. But things that we could have been moving toward quickly they were against.

Now suddenly they are all for action. They are all for action.

What do we need? We need more leases on the Outer Continental Shelf. Well, what about the fact that the industry today is sitting on leases that can access 80 percent of the known reserves of oil and gas off the United States of America? But they are simply not developing them.

Now, the industry says, well, they just don't have enough deep water drilling rigs and other things. But last year Enron, I mean--sorry. That is another guilty party here. But ExxonMobil made more money than any corporation in the history of the world, $40 billion. And what did they do with two thirds of their profit? Did they put it into new supply? Did they put it into new drilling equipment? Heck no. They bought back their own

stock to enrich their board and their execs. The president who retired got a $400 million retirement, and he bought an oil field in Africa with his retirement. Now that is where their profits and their money went.

They are in no hurry to develop new resources. But they would like to lock up what might still be out there while Bush and Cheney are in the White House so that they can get sweetheart deals like the one proposed yesterday for oil shale, because these are their oilmen in the White House. Plain and simple. That's what this bum's rush is all about.

The American people need short-term price relief. It isn't going to come through letting more leases in sensitive areas that the industry sits on. It would come from breaking the back of the speculators, something they don't want to do, closing the Enron loophole.

Remember Ken Lay, head of Enron from Texas, the President's biggest political benefactor throughout his entire life?

The Enron loophole was created for him to trade oil and gas off the books. Well, Ken Lay is dead, before he went to prison. Enron is bankrupt, and the loophole lives on, and that is the price we are paying at the pump today because of commodity speculation.

Take on the speculators, break their back. Break their back any way you can. Re-regulate them or take oil out of the SPR. Break the back of the speculators. That will give us short-term price relief. Develop our resources in the midterm, and new energy future for the long term, not dependent upon oil and foreign oil.

I thank my good friend and colleague for yielding the time.

Madam Speaker, this is an extraordinarily serious problem. Americans today are already familiar with the problems of our transportation infrastructure. On a daily basis, trucks are detoured because of weight-limited bridges. Individuals are sitting idling in traffic in congestion because of inadequate and obsolete infrastructure. People are flooding on to transit at a record rate. Transit ridership is reaching levels that haven't been seen since we had a decent system of transit in this country 50, 60 years ago.

But the stress on the system is extraordinary. People are trying to escape the high cost of gas. But our transit systems are struggling to pay the bills themselves. So this is not the time to begin to reduce our already pathetic and inadequate investment in our transportation infrastructure in the United States. The gas tax was 18.4 cents a gallon in 1993 and gas was a buck a gallon. Today, the gas tax is 18.3 cents a gallon, and gas was $4.29 in my district last weekend. And that is not the cause of the run-up in price. And the buying and purchasing power of that small amount of tax is about half of what it was 15 years ago. So this is not the time to begin to think about even less investment. And that is what looms before us if this bill doesn't pass today and isn't signed into law by the President.

Less investment. My colleague, Earl Blumenauer from Oregon, corrected me after his speech. I said, you know, America is falling to a third- world status in terms of its investments in transportation infrastructure. He said, no, actually that was pretty insulting to a lot of third-world countries who are investing more than we are. So I have begun to call us ``fourth world.'' That is a formerly first-world infrastructure falling even behind many countries in the third world in terms of investment.

150,000 bridges in America are either functionally obsolete or structurally deficient. I think we should post every one of those bridges with a sign so people know every time they drive over it.

This is not the time to begin to talk about doing less work to maintain our bridges and deal with the structural deficiencies and the functional obsolescence. This is not the time to begin to pull back on meeting our commitments to surface transportation infrastructure.

I'm so pleased that the Ways and Means Committee has chosen to act and replace funds that were raised out of the gas tax, intended to be only spent on transportation infrastructure, but transferred to the general fund and spent on who knows what. This will put us back in compliance with the law and the principles of the United States of America.

As we raise money dedicated to transportation, to be spent on transportation, there is a lot of investment that can be done. This is a needed bill. Pass this bill today.

Back when George Bush was elected in 2001, gas was $1.48 a gallon, and we imported 52 percent of our oil. Today, gas is $4.39 a gallon in my district, and we're importing 58 percent of our oil. In the meantime, what's been done?

Well, we adopted the Republican energy plan, formulated in secret by Dick Cheney--yet another oilman along with George Bush--and some people say, Well, it's not working. I think it's working. Record profits for the oil industry and their friends, $551 billion since George Bush took office and more dependence on imported oil from Saudi Arabia and other friends of the President.

We need a new energy policy in this country, and we're striking out in that direction. We've already passed new mandates for fuel efficiency. We tried to move us towards renewables. But we need some interim supply. That's why we have the DRILL Act up today. We need interim supply, but Big Oil is sitting on leases that can access 80 percent of our estimated reserves in Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf, and they're not drilling it.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I had to come to the floor when I heard the gentleman from Texas and he talked about the Democrats' plan is working. No, actually, we're living under the Republican energy plan. Remember that in 2001 Dick Cheney had secret meetings with all the executives in the oil industry and other energy producers. And in 2005--the gentleman has a short memory--the Republicans, after 4 years, passed an all-Republican energy policy written by Dick Cheney, passed by the Republican House and the Republican Senate and signed by George Bush.

And it is working exactly as some of us predicted. We said it would make us more dependent on Saudi oil. It did. Fifty-two percent imports when George Bush took office, 58 percent of our oil is imported today. We said it would raise the price. It did. When George Bush took office, gas was a $1.47 a gallon. Today it is $4.39 a gallon in my district.

But it raised one other thing that is vitally important to the Republican Party. Their friends in the oil industry have made a pile of money since George Bush took office. Five hundred eleven billion with a ``B'' dollars profit for the oil industry since George Bush took office. So, yes, this is intentional. And yes, it was designed, signed, sealed and delivered by the Republican Party when they controlled all of Washington, D.C. We are living under their energy policy.

We are trying to set a new, sustainable energy future for this country. And in the interim, yes, we want to develop domestic resources with the DRILL Act to help us with that transition. But we want to break the dependence. You don't. You made it worse.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

There are a lot of reasons we're in this pickle we are today. But let's just remember one. George Bush elected 2000; Dick Cheney's secret meetings with the oil and gas industry. They formulated an energy policy. That energy policy was adopted by the Republican House, the Republican Senate, and signed by the Republican President. That was in 2005. Many of us said it was shortsighted, it would make us more dependent upon imported oil, and it has.

When George Bush was elected, 52 percent of our oil was imported. Today it's 58 percent. Many of us said it would drive up the price. It has. When George Bush was elected, it was $1.46 a gallon. Today it's $4.39 a gallon in my district.

So they're saying now suddenly, Whoa. It's the Democrats' fault. No. We're living under the failures of the Republican oil industry energy policy. There's actually 164,968,695 reasons why we're living under that. That's the amount of money the Republican Party has received from the oil industry in the last 18 years, $164 million in political contributions. Now, that's a pretty big motivation.

There's another thing going on here. Since George Bush took office, the profits of the oil industry have been $511 billion in this country. That's $511 billion out of Americans' pockets and into the oil industry's pockets. They made more money under 7 years of George Bush than they made in the entire quarter century preceding his presidency. Yeah. There's something a little bit rotten here.

They talk about drilling offshore and all of that stuff. Well, let's talk about short-term relief.

There's three ways to get short-term relief. One is release our oil. Release our oil. We have paid to put oil in the Strategic Reserve for emergencies. This is an emergency. It's been done three times: 1991, the price went down 33 percent; 2000, it went down 18 percent; 2005, it went down 9 percent.

That would give relief today at the pump, and there's another thing that we could do, but they're against this, too.

The gentleman from Texas talked about, oh, they want to file a complaint against OPEC. Well, you know, we probably do, but George Bush isn't going to do that, that's for sure. Here's George Bush holding hands with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia when he was over there begging them to increase production.

OPEC's production, with a doubling in the price of oil, is down 2\1/ 2\ percent. They have colluded to drive up the price of oil and limit the supply, and we have a legal option, which the President refuses to use. He refuses to file a complaint in the World Trade Organization for a clear violation of the rules of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, article 11, by the OPEC countries.

That would have an immediate impact for the American people. And then there's the speculators.

Today, the largest holder of oil resources in the United States of America is not ExxonMobil, not Shell, not Conoco, name all of our oil companies. No, it's Morgan Stanley on Wall Street, through their speculative activity, followed by Goldman Sachs and followed by others who are speculating and driving up the price of this market.

We have credible testimony from Wall Street experts, if we reined in the speculation which was created by the Enron loophole--remember Enron? Texas corporation, Ken Boy Lay, the President's best friend. He's dead. Enron's bankrupt. He would have gone to jail for fraud. But the loophole lives on, and we're all paying at the pump. An estimated 50 percent, according to Wall Street experts, is going into speculative activities, but they don't want to take on speculative activities. They just want to talk about one thing, and that is, they want to drill in

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

In 1923, President Harding took the Saudi Arabia of the United States and put it into the Naval Petroleum Reserve. There is a huge pool of known oil, over 10 billion barrels underneath what has now been called, and the Republicans changed it from the Naval Petroleum Reserve to the National Petroleum Reserve. And yes, indeed, President Clinton did let the first leases in that more than a decade ago.

The companies have drilled 25 test wells to find out there is indeed oil under there, but they have not connected over here to the Prudhoe Bay pipeline and there is no construction going on and no active drilling going on.

Now this area that they want to argue about, in 1950 it was made into a wildlife reserve. Now this was made into a Naval Petroleum Reserve because it has huge amounts of known oil. This was made into a wildlife reserve because it has huge amounts of known wildlife. President Harding didn't make ANWR into the Naval Petroleum Reserve because no one knows if there is any oil under there. They try to pretend that they know that there is oil there, but the Bush administration's own Mineral Management Service says there is a 50 percent chance of recoverable oil under ANWR.

So why not drill here in NPR-A? Why don't the Republicans and the oil companies want to fully exploit these 10 billion barrels of oil? I think there is a pretty simple answer to that, because they are doing really well under the Bush-Cheney energy policy. Remember, written in secret, voted on and put into law by the Republican Congress, signed by George Bush. During George Bush's tenure, the profits of the oil companies have been $511 billion, a new record every year George Bush has been in office, more money in 7 years than in the preceding quarter-century.

This system is working quite well for them. They don't want to increase supply. In fact, they are working hand-in-glove with OPEC and others who are colluding to restrict supply.

Drill responsibly in leased land. Exploit America's resources.

We are going to hear a lot today about the need for new leases. There is no need to open new areas and new leases. Here is Alaska. The former Naval Petroleum Reserve leased by Bill Clinton, authorized by the Republican Congress, has more than 10 billion barrels of oil under it. It is known to exist. The oil industry has the leases; they have drilled 25 wells; they have capped them. They have no plans to connect it to the existing pipeline and bring that oil here to consumers.

But they are saying, no, we want to go over here, we want more leases over here in ANWR. We don't even know if there is any oil under ANWR. How about they deal with the known 10 billion barrels here and provide us some relief at the pump? Then we can talk about other places they might want to go in the future.

Mr. Speaker, this is a little lesson about one of the largest finds of oil in the United States. We have known about it since 1923.

In 1923 this large area of Alaska was designated as Naval Petroleum Reserve Number 4. Why? Because we knew there was a huge pool of oil under it. Estimates are the current figure is up to 15, ``b,'' billion barrels of oil. That's a lot of oil. So the President, I believe it was President Harding at the time, designated that as a Naval Petroleum Reserve.

This little area over here, the one they don't want to talk about, was designated as a wildlife refuge. Why was that? Well, because we didn't know there was any oil under it. So the oil's here, make it an oil preserve. There's wildlife here, make it a wildlife preserve. Now they say they want to drill in the wildlife preserve, but they're kind of neglecting this one over here.

Now, it was a Naval Petroleum Reserve until 1996. In 1996 the Republican Congress voted to open it up to drilling by the oil industry. Bill Clinton signed the bill, and, in fact, the Clinton administration let the first 3 million acres of leases in the year 2000. Eight years ago the industry got 3 million acres of land leased over a pool of 15 billion barrels of oil. They have drilled 25 wells and capped them. That's it. The Bush administration is going to lease another 4 million this next year.

If we don't have this bill, maybe they'll drill some more wells and cap them. They have no plans. Now, they say they want to drill over here. You will notice actually this area is closer to the existing pipeline than this area over here, but they want to debate this area over here with no known oil reserves and no pipeline and neglect this area over here with massive reserves and no pipeline and apparently no plans to build a pipeline.

If we pass this bill today, that will all change. They won't be able to sit on the largest single pool of oil in the United States territory anymore. They will have to begin in good faith to develop it. But guess what. The industry really doesn't want to do that because they're making a bucket of money the way it is now by pretending there's a shortage and not drilling.

Now, that's just the Alaska issue. If we go offshore and look elsewhere, as Mr. Markey said earlier, 80 percent, according to the United States Minerals Management Service, 80 percent of the oil and gas that's known to exist off of the Continental United States is accessible from existing leases. Unfortunately, 6,491 of those leases are sitting idle. On different days you get different excuses: ``Oh, it takes a really long time.'' Well, if it takes a really long time, why do we want to let new leases when it's taken a really long time to develop the old leases that they're sitting on, that have known pools of oil under them? They're taking a bucket of money now. They don't want things to change; we do.

Produce American oil for America.

The former Naval Petroleum Reserve has 15 billion barrels of oil under it. It was leased by President Bill Clinton in 1998. There is no pending lengthy application process for the pipeline. They have no plans to connect to the pipeline.

Certainly, whatever time I have left.

I thank the gentleman of the full committee for his outstanding work over the many years for transit. How prophetic many of his positions have been. I remember during the last reauthorization fighting to just get a tiny bit more for transit. We didn't get what we wanted and said we would need, but we did get a little more, despite a particular opposition from a number of Republican Senators.

We are loving our transit systems to death today. Americans of necessity, or with changes in life-style, are flocking

onto mass transit at record rates, rates not seen in half a century in the United States of America. That's the good news.

The bad news is so many Americans are flooding onto our transit systems, the most in 50 years, that our transit systems are having to curtail service and cut routes. There is something very wrong with this picture.

At the very time that the American people are demanding an alternative because they can't afford the $4.50 a gallon for their car or they are tired of the congestion and commute, which have not yet been effectively dealt with because of our lack of investment in other infrastructure, they are turning to transit as an alternative.

But transit is confronted with, if it is a bus, a doubling of the cost of diesel. And other modes that are electrically driven have seen their energy costs go up. But beyond that, the rate of utilization, the people crushing on, are wearing the equipment out even faster and we haven't been keeping up with the replacement cycle because of the under-investment in the system.

I was talking to someone who came in from Rockville today. They said you wouldn't believe how packed it was. I said I think we are going to have to adopt the Japanese system where we hire little guys with white gloves to start pushing people onto our Metro cars, or our MAX cars in Oregon, because there are so many people who want to get on, we have to utilize what isn't enough capacity.

So this bill is the first, little, baby, incremental step to giving some assistance to those transit agencies who want to give assistance to an American public that is hurting because of failed energy policies.

I am not going to re-debate the energy policies with the gentleman from Florida, but that was an incredibly creative recapitulation of the failed energy policies of the Bush-Cheney administration over the last 6 years.

So we need now to deal with some of the results of those failures.

And we've debated other bills to help provide relief to the American consumers there. But here we have to provide relief and help to our transit agencies who are going to extend a hand to our American commuters and families. Unfortunately, this is, as yet, only a promise. It's an authorization. And the budget is a little tight around here unless you're one to fund a war with emergency funding. The President won't declare a transit emergency, I don't think. Maybe we can get him to do that. But we need to get some funding and flesh out the bones of this bill.