BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

This is a very important debate because it goes right to the very heart of what is needed in order to ensure that we provide the proper protections for families across our country, from the despoliation of the environment and all the public health and safety and environmental catastrophes that then can affect American families.

I have here a picture of the Deepwater Horizon in flames as it's about to go to the bottom of the ocean. This is what happened because of deregulation. This is what happened when regulations are not applied and enforced in a way that ensures that the public health and safety is protected, the greatest environmental disaster in the history of the United States, devastating the lives of 11 men and the livelihoods of millions of people in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the legacy of what happened during the Bush administration, a ticking timebomb that exploded across our country, leading to this environmental catastrophe.

The same thing, by the way, is true in our financial marketplace where, in the Bush years, they turned a blind eye to obvious problems with derivatives, obvious problems with chicanery inside of the financial marketplace, a ticking timebomb that exploded, that has wreaked havoc on millions of Americans, losing their home, their jobs.

When George Bush left office, the Dow Jones industrial average at 6,400, 6,400, after 8 years in office. That's what George Bush left in office, by turning a blind eye to the kinds of regulations that it needed there to protect the lives of families. Today, with Barack Obama on the job, with a Securities and Exchange Commission doing its job, the Dow is now over 12,000, almost doubled, because people have confidence in the regulations. They can trust their money in the stock market once again. That's what happens when regulations are there to protect ordinary people.

Now, what is their proposal? Their proposal is to take the Environmental Protection Agency and to turn the Environmental Protection Agency into every polluter's ally. They're going to bring a bill out here onto the House floor that says they're going to repeal the ability of the EPA to improve the fuel economy standards of the vehicles which we drive, to ensure that regulations are on the books that we have renewable fuels that we develop here in the United States, not imported from OPEC.

The result of that bill that they're going to bring out here on the House floor in the next 2 weeks? Some 5 million barrels of oil per day that otherwise would be backed out, that we would not import from the Middle East, will now have to be imported. At $100 a barrel with 365 days in a year, we're talking about $162 billion a year that the American consumer will have to send to the Middle East because they do not want to regulate.

[Time: 19:20]

They do not want to ensure that the efficiency of the cars which people drive, the amount of pollution that comes out of those cars, they say, is too high a price to pay. While here as we watch Egypt explode, Tunisia explode, other countries in the Middle East on the verge of having the same kind of explosions, this kind of environmental, this kind of safety protection that we put on the books enforces the need for us to ensure that we do not allow for the repeal of these environmental and safety protections. That's what this debate is all about.

This is the same kind of war on the environment that we saw during the 8 years of the Bush administration. This is the result of that, ladies and gentlemen. And that's where they're going to take us if we have this wholesale destruction of this environmental and safety regime which has been put on the books in order to protect the American public.

At this point I ask unanimous consent that all time on the resolution be yielded back and that H. Res. 72 be adopted so that we can move on to consider legislation to create jobs in our country, which is really what we should be debating out here on the House floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT