North American-Made Energy Security Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. I thank the gentleman from Kentucky for yielding.

I rise in support of this jobs bill, the Keystone bill, that actually opens up another 700,000 barrels a day coming into the United States from Canada. First of all, this oil will be going to United States refineries in Texas to refine oil for Americans. On top of that, it will create another 20,000 American jobs.

If you look at what that means, first of all, China wants to get that oil from Canada. So if we don't agree to this, if the President, for whatever reason--because radicals don't want that oil coming in. They don't like oil at all. So I guess they're going to ride around on bicycles, and that's going to get them where they need to be.

We've got to live in reality. We've got a demand in this country for oil. It's either going to come from Middle Eastern countries, many of whom don't like us, or we can bring more of it in not only from America, where the United States has more reserves that they won't allow us to utilize, but here Canada is saying 700,000 barrels a day can come into America, where we can create those good jobs. What does that really mean? That means we don't have to buy 700,000 barrels a day from Middle Eastern countries.

Let's talk about the trade gap. The biggest part of our trade gap is all the money that we send to these Middle Eastern countries and other countries because we don't produce enough of our own in America because of these radical policies. So you bring that 700,000 barrels a day from Canada, that's $25 billion a year that we're not sending to Middle Eastern countries who don't like us.

If you want to talk about a trade gap, when we trade with Canada, think about this: When we trade with Canada, 90 cents on the dollar comes back to the United States of America. Canada is a great ally and a good friend of ours. It's a good trading relationship. We get 90 percent of that money back. When we trade with Middle Eastern countries, buying their oil, which we do right now, less than half of that money comes back to the United States.

So if you want to talk about this from dollars and cents, from jobs, from national security, all of that adds up to passing this bill to build this relationship, build this pipeline with Canada, who says they want to partner with us. Now, if we turn them down, they'll go to China. But they want this relationship. They want to increase our energy security and create those jobs.

I urge passage of this bill.

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