Congress Must Act to Defend the Gulf

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Mr. OLSON. Well, thank you for hosting this Special Order tonight on such a critically important issue for the American people.

I would like to thank my colleague from Florida for coming by and for giving his perspectives on how this disaster is affecting Florida.

I'm going to have a theme tonight, Judge. I was in the Navy for 10 years--a naval officer. We're trained to lead. I mean, in my aircraft, I was a crew of 12--five officers, seven enlisted folks. I was the patrol plane commander, so those 11 individuals depended upon me to take them out, to do the mission, and to come back home safely. To sum it up in two words, the philosophy is ``leaders lead.'' Well, guess what? We are not seeing leadership out of Washington.

We've had a very difficult situation. We've had the largest oil spill in American history, and there are thousands of jobs affected by it already: the food processing industry; the fishing industry across the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama; the tourist industry. We're hitting the summer season. This is when people go on vacations. We're past Memorial Day. From what I hear, the hotels are about half full. It has had a significant impact on the people of the gulf coast.

Yet what does the administration do? Do they lead? No. Again, in a knee-jerk reaction to this terrible tragedy, they imposed a 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling--all of it stopped. Again, it's a disaster for our economy and for our Nation. Let me go over some of the specifics with you as I know my good friend knows.

There are 150,000 jobs that are going to be lost because of this moratorium. That's 1 1/2 times my hometown of Sugar Land, which the judge mentioned. That's like wiping out Sugar Land and going down to Rosenberg or Richmond and taking them off the map. This is 150,000 jobs.

There are 33 rigs currently out there. I've talked

to a constituent in my district who has an ownership interest in two of those rigs.

I asked him last week, How long can you hang out?

He said, Three weeks max.

How much is it costing you?

Well, the rigs are a little different. One's down around $500,000 a day. The other one is at $1 million a day. $1 million.

If this baby goes on, if this moratorium goes on for 6 months, that is going to be $180 million that that company is going to just have to absorb. Yet you know what they're going to do. Guess what? They're going. They're going overseas. He has been talked to. My constituent has been talked to, and he has had interest from Australia, from Brazil, from western Africa, and from eastern Africa already. He is considering their options very seriously because he can't afford to be paying $500,000 or $1 million per day as long as this moratorium goes on. This is going to have a devastating effect on our domestic production of energy.

One of the great problems we have in America--and it is something we should have fixed years ago--is our dependence on foreign oil. We all remember 1979 when the Shah fell, when Iran was taken over by the Ayatollah Khomeini and when the Arab world cut off our fuel supply. I was a 16-year-old in Houston, Texas, and I had just gotten my driver's license. So my job was to take the car up when it got down to about a quarter of a tank of gas. I'd take it up and get in that gas line depending on what the last number of my license plate was--odd or even on an odd or even day--and I loved it. I was standing there with my radio and with my window rolled down. Now that I'm an adult, I realize what a disaster that was. It's not gone. I mean it's still out there today.

As the judge knows, we've got serious challenges in the Middle East. I mean Mr. Ahmadinejad in Iran is scary. I mean he is trying to get a nuclear weapon. He was here in our country a couple of weeks ago at the United Nations. He sat down with George Stephanopoulos and literally--this is the leader of Iran--told him that Osama bin Laden is here in Washington, D.C. Let me say that again. Judge, I think Osama bin Laden is here in Washington, D.C. This guy is trying to get some nuclear weapons. He certainly has some oil, and he has friends out there--the Saudis and others--who would cut him off if something happens.

What has happened, as you know, too, Judge, just as well, is that this administration has hurt our relationship with our great ally Israel. In 18 months, our relationship with Israel has gone from being one of our strongest allies to someone the world looks at and asks, Is the United States really with them? That has created another dangerous situation where countries out there are going to start taking chances and taking shots at our best friend. Again, what happens at the end of the day if we stand up for Israel?

Maybe we get another oil embargo. We can't afford that. Yet this administration's actions by imposing this 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the gulf are going to help that cause.

I don't know where to start sometimes. As my colleagues have mentioned, we introduced a bill yesterday, a very simple bill. It's one page--half a page. It basically says, Let's end the moratorium, Mr. President. We had a meeting today with Mr. Salazar. The Secretary of the Interior came over today.

I asked him, Do you believe that you were given all of the accurate analysis on the economic impact of this moratorium on deepwater drilling? Did you know all of the facts? Did you know that 150,000 Americans are going to lose their jobs and that those rigs in the gulf are most likely going to go overseas and start developing oil in foreign nations? They're not coming back any time soon.

It's a minimum--a minimum from what I've heard from the people in my district--of 5 years before those rigs will even consider coming back because they will have paid all that money to go over there. They're going to sit there. They're going to make money. They're going to decrease our national reserves here in America, and they're going to increase our dependence on foreign oil.

Again, Judge, leaders lead. What has the administration done?

Well, you know, as you talked about earlier, Governor Jindal asked for some sand, for about 24 miles of sand to place in between some of the marshlands that were going to be impacted by the oil spill. It took our government 3 weeks to approve that.

Why? Why? he asked.

Well, we had to do some studies. You know, the Environmental Protection Agency had to look and make sure that, if we put that sand in front of the berms, we weren't going to do some things to hurt the birds and the wildlife behind that.

You're going to hurt the wildlife behind that, and you're going to damage those birds when that oil gets in there. Put the sand up. Prevent that from happening. Let's deal with that problem. Amazing.

The Jones Act. You talked about that. We've got great allies out there who want to help us, who have come to us and who have said, Please, we can help you. What did we do? No thanks. We've got this law that requires American unions, our unions, to man the ships. We don't need your help.

Katrina, 2005. President Bush was asked, you know, to waive the Jones Act. He stepped up and did it. Why? Because it was right for America. He was focused on the problem, which was help Louisiana and New Orleans recover from that hurricane.

The problem here is real simple, Judge. We've got oil spewing out of a hole in the Gulf of Mexico. We need to focus on that. That's the problem, and the administration is not focused on that. Again, leaders lead.

What do we see out of the White House today? Coerced British Petroleum to a $20 billion slush fund, a privately funded slush fund for government to use and spend as they see fit. Now, BP has made some mistakes, and the investigation is not complete, but there is a lot of evidence and indication that they have made some mistakes, have cut some corners and have done things that haven't been consistent with standard operating procedure.

And they should agree to reimburse the Americans who have been affected by that.

But for the government to force upon them a $20 million concession that the government's going to handle and dole out as they see fit is just not what's in our country's interest. We see what this administration has done if we give them large amounts of money. The first big vote I had as a Member of Congress, almost $900 billion in economic stimulus package. Guess what? Has it stimulated the economy like the administration, like the President, said it would? Has it kept our job rate below 8 percent; our unemployment rate? No. We're hovering about 10 percent. What do we spend it on? You know the answer to that, Judge. Two-thirds of the money has been spent on public sector jobs and one-third on private sector jobs. I'd submit--and this isn't taking much of a chance--that's not how you grow an economy. And yet the administration has now coerced British Petroleum to give them $20 billion as they see fit.

Finally, and I've got the President's speech here, about the last third of it didn't have anything to do with the Gulf of Mexico. It had something to do with a much bigger agenda. He was talking about why this substantiated and justified the administration's pursuit of a hydrocarbon emission law--a cap-and-tax, as we call it up here in the House. I mean, again, why are we talking about this when we've got oil spilling out of the Gulf right now. And the answer is: because the administration has an agenda that doesn't have anything to do with the oil coming out. It has everything to do with changing America, making us uncompetitive in a global market, increasing our costs of energy for every American consumer, and getting a big tax increase with all these payments, allotments that the corporations, companies, small businesses across America have to pay. And it's quite frustrating.

I mean, when I go back home, Judge, and I am sure you get this, What's going on in D.C.? And, Who's leading? An the answer is, Nobody is leading right now. Again, leaders lead. And that's why I introduced that law that you mentioned earlier to just repeal the moratorium. Get the American people back working on those wells.

The President, as you recall, met this past week with the families, the families of the 11 rig workers that were killed in the explosion. Many of them, from the press reports, told him, Please, Mr. President, don't do this moratorium. Don't do this to my husband, who most of these people were born and raised in small towns in Louisiana, like Homer, and they planned on living their lives there, raising their children there, raising grandchildren there. And they see what's at stake here. They don't want a moratorium, even though their family members have made the ultimate sacrifice.

It's my hope that the administration listens to the American people, looks at the numbers of 150,000 jobs that are going to be lost. Just the fact that we're going to lose all of our--most of our domestic offshore production of oil, and we're going to take that overseas to foreign nations. And one other thing is the second largest income tax source for the Federal Government is offshore drilling. About $6 billion a year, bye-bye. It's just incredibly frustrating as a freshman Member of Congress that we're going through this, Judge. We need to fight to make sure that this moratorium is repealed, because it's in America's best interest.

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Mr. OLSON. Judge, I think the President gave us the answer to your question there. In his speech yesterday, this is what he said. ``Already, I have issued a 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of safety and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue.''

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