Energy Policy

Floor Speech

ENERGY POLICY -- (Senate - May 01, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BROWN. Madam President, I can't quite believe what I just heard. Because Democrats in 2006 said we need a different energy policy than the White House, a President and Vice President who both come out of the oil industry, both top energy executives, where much of the funding for the President's party comes from the oil industry, and in 2006, the Democrats said the Congress betrayed the American people because they let the oil industry write the energy bill, now my friend from Florida is saying it is the Democrats' fault that gas prices are through the roof.

One of the best friends of the President was the CEO of Enron, a major funder to the President, close friend of the President who had a personal nickname, and Enron had gamed the system through speculating and speculating. It cost consumers, especially on the west coast, hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars as people raked off profits from their speculating. We are seeing the same kinds of things. I don't know if they are the President's friends doing it anymore, but I know there are people who have gamed the system. That is the reason, with no major international incident in the last 2 years, no major outage of a refinery or fire of a refinery or pipeline disruption, that prices have spiked so much.

It is clear that a Justice Department working for the President of the United States, that is not beholden to the oil industry, might actually take some action on price fixing and recommend an excess profits tax--all the kinds of things we could be doing in this body and that the executive could do. But in this body, we have seen filibusters.

Every time we try to do something on oil prices, every time we try to do something on long-term alternative energy, the Republicans filibuster. They have filibustered more than 60 times. It is approaching 70. I am not sure of the number; it is hard to keep up. They have filibustered more times already in this congressional session than they did in any 2-year session in history by a lot, and they are continuing to do it.

We would love to sit down with my friend on the other side of the aisle and work on real energy legislation and wean this body and wean the White House from their addiction to oil company campaign dollars, and help wean the American people from our addiction to foreign oil. We would love to work on that.

I introduced legislation yesterday that will help to jump-start the green energy industry in this country. It is clear we need to do a lot of that. But the American public is tired of finger pointing. It is time this Congress did more on energy, and that the Republicans, instead of filibustering--there are 51 Democrats in this body; we need 60 votes to do anything because of the filibuster--instead of the Republicans holding together and blocking things, instead of filibustering, let us work together on energy issues and not have the oil companies dictate to this body, as they did for year after year after year.

When I was in the House of Representatives, the oil companies dictated to the House of Representatives leadership, and everybody in those days in the majority party--which was the Republicans then--went along with their leaders on writing an energy bill that had $18 billion of subsidies and giveaways and tax breaks to the oil industry. Yet they are the most profitable industry in America year after year after year.

Something gives there. It is time for something very different. I want to work together. The finger pointing should end. Let's sit down and do this right, but don't block us to do things that will help stabilize gas prices now and help to bring them down over the short and medium term and long term to come up with a real energy policy so we are not relying on--as my friend Senator Martinez said--not relying on Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and countries that are not so friendly to us.

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