Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2012

Floor Speech

Mr. WAXMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I rise in opposition to this instruction.

First of all, whatever your views are on the pipeline coming out of Canada, this is not the place for this issue to be brought up because what this provision would do would be to short-circuit the decisionmaking and mandate approval of the pipeline. It doesn't belong in the transportation bill.

We see this over and over again. Our Republican colleagues like to take bills and then hold them hostage to get what they want. They wanted to get the pipeline approved so they mandated the President had to make a decision within 60 days in a previous bill. The President didn't want it. He said, Okay, I'll sign it. But then he said he's not ready to make a decision in 60 days.

So this provision doesn't require him to make a decision. It tells him this is going to be decided. This is going to be done. That's what we used to call earmarks, and in fact this is an earmark--a special interest earmark.

On its merits, this legislative earmark for TransCanada makes no sense. Mandating approval of the Keystone XL pipeline might help jobs in other countries. It might create more jobs in Canada. But when the Republicans tell us it's going to produce so many jobs in the United States, they are not buying a pipeline; they are buying a pipe dream.

A green light for Keystone will lead to massive imports of transmission pipe manufactured overseas. The American people will bear all the risks and Big Oil will reap all the rewards of this pipeline. We are going to get more carbon pollution, more dangerous oil spills, land seizures by a foreign company, and higher oil prices in the Midwest. Big Oil gets the ability to extract more profits from the Midwest, a conduit for exploiting tar sands products to China, because that's where this oil is going to go. Because it's an international transport of oil from these tar sands from Canada to the United States going down to the Gulf, it can then be put on steamers and sent to China, and there is no restriction against it. We have open markets, and China would be delighted to take that oil. But it is not going to benefit us. It is going to benefit China.

President Obama listened to the differing views of American citizens and he made a responsible decision. He said he was not going to approve this pipeline through the ecologically fragile Sand Hills area of Nebraska. But the State Department would consider an alternative route, and Nebraska is still looking for another route that would be acceptable to the State.

The President is making sure he has all the information he needs to make the right decision. This provision takes the opposite approach. It gives the pipeline an unprecedented legislative earmark. It doesn't give discretion. It requires the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve the pipeline immediately, even though we don't know what route it will take through Nebraska.

I think we ought to recognize these tar sands in Canada are very, very dirty, and it is going to require a lot of energy to get them into an oil form that can be transported through a pipeline. The consequence of that is going to be to add more carbon emissions at a time when our planet is already suffering from global warming and extreme climate change.

It would be incredibly reckless for Congress to jeopardize this critically important transportation bill by playing politics over an unrelated and extraneous provision. I urge my colleagues to reject this motion and to not put in this poison pill provision that would lead to the whole transportation bill being vetoed.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Those of us who are speaking on this motion to instruct the conferees are from the Energy and Commerce Committee, not the Transportation Committee, which developed the fundamental underlying bill to which this pipeline issue has been attached. The transportation bill provides an enormous amount of money for people to have jobs building the roads, mass transit, other kinds of transportation systems, and that all will be stopped if we don't renew the transportation bill itself.

The Senate, on an overwhelming bipartisan basis, got together and passed a transportation bill. The House wasn't able to do that. We were passing short-term extensions of existing law until we passed something to go to conference, and we're now in conference. So the motion is to instruct the conferees to take the House position on this pipeline issue.

The problem with it is the President has said he'll veto the bill. He'll veto the transportation bill if the pipeline provision is in it. He said it because he feels it needs to be reviewed before the decision is made on whether to allow this pipeline to be built. I don't consider that unreasonable.

What's really going on here is the Republicans want to stick it to the President. This is all politics. They want to make the President have to veto the bill, and then they'll say he vetoed the bill, how outrageous it is.

Let's not play politics. Let's reject this motion to instruct.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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