Providing for Consideration of H.R. 6, Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act; and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 3301, North American Energy Infrastructure Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McGOVERN. I want to thank the gentleman from Texas, Dr. Burgess, for yielding me the customary 30 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this rule and to the underlying bills. First of all, this rule is not open, and it denies some important and germane amendments. This is consistent with the increasingly closed mindset of this Republican leadership.

I want to remind my colleagues that this is now the most closed Congress in history. There have been 62 closed rules in this Congress alone. That is a title I don't think either party would enjoy having, but this is the most closed Congress in history. Speaker Boehner, in his opening speech, said that openness would be the new standard. I guess he misspoke because that is not what is happening on these bills, and it hasn't been happening on most other important pieces of legislation. The approval rating of Congress from a poll, I think, Gallup did last week is at 7 percent. My friends can't blame that on President Obama, and they can't blame that on someone else. They are running the show here in the House. This is a reflection on the work or on the lack of work that is being done here.

I think the American people want a full and open debate on important issues. I think the American people want us to focus on things that will actually make their lives better and that have a chance of actually becoming law. We have millions of our fellow citizens who are unemployed, and we can't even get the Republican leadership to bring an extension of unemployment insurance to the House floor for a vote. We can't even get it on the floor for a vote.

We are trying to raise the minimum wage so that we are not subsidizing McDonald's or Wendy's, which pay their workers minimum wage. We are trying to give people a raise so that work actually pays in this country. We can't even get a minimum wage bill to this House floor for a vote. We can't even debate it, and we can't have a vote on it. They are blocking it.

We need to fix our immigration system. It is broken. An immigration reform bill passed in the United States Senate in a bipartisan way, and it solves many of the problems that some of my friends on the other side are complaining about, but the leadership of this House won't even let us bring a bipartisan immigration reform bill to the House floor so that we can vote on it.

It is no wonder why, under this Republican leadership, the approval rating of this body is 7 percent. I think that is history in and of itself. I don't know whether there was ever a Congress in the history of this country that had such a low rating.

Now here we are with this legislation, H.R. 6, the amazingly named Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act, which would improve neither our domestic prosperity nor global freedom. Instead, it would undermine the Department of Energy's approval process for the export of liquefied natural gas. The current process allows the DOE to evaluate the impacts of LNG exports on domestic natural gas prices for consumers and manufacturers as well as environmental impacts.

This bill is a solution in search of a problem, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Energy is already aggressively approving LNG exports. The amounts already approved for exports would transform the United States into the world's second largest exporter of LNG. Further, under the bill, LNG would not be exported any faster. I urge my colleagues not to be fooled by the rhetoric that you may hear on the floor today. Passing this bill will not magically solve the natural gas problem in Ukraine or in other parts of the world.

The other bill, H.R. 3301, the North American Energy Infrastructure Act, would dramatically weaken the environmental review process for transborder pipeline and electrical transmission line projects. This bill, which is a blatantly transparent effort to ``rig the game'' in favor of the Keystone pipeline project, would preclude the Federal Government from reviewing a project's full impacts, including oil spills and the consequences for landowners, public safety, drinking water, wildlife, and, yes, Mr. Speaker, climate change. Let me say those two words again because I know that many of our Republican colleagues tend to stick their heads in the sand when they hear them--climate change.

I think it is important to say a few things. Here is what we know. We know that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We know that carbon dioxide traps heat. We know that the levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are higher than they have been in 800,000 years. We know that 9 of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have been in the last decade. We know that last month was the warmest month of May ever recorded.

Yet, to hear some of my Republican friends, we should just move along--nothing to see here, nothing to worry about. There is no need to worry that the Arctic ice sheets are melting, leading to rapidly rising sea levels. There is no need to worry about more severe and deadly weather events. There is no need to worry about profound impacts to agricultural production. At best, you will hear them say that the science is still unsettled. It isn't. Climate change is real--it is happening--and we need to figure out what we should do about it.

Sometimes they will say: Well, I am not a scientist, so I can't really comment about it. Mr. Speaker, I am not a scientist either, but I know that, if I drop my pen, it will fall to the floor because of gravity. No, most of us here in Congress are not scientists, but the overwhelming majority of the best and brightest scientific minds in the world have concluded that climate change is real, that it is happening, and humankind is currently making the problem worse.

It would be nice, given the enormity of this problem, if my Republican friends would work with Democrats and would work with the White House to try to fashion a response. Instead, they deny that it is a problem, and we get more of the same old-same old. I regret that very, very much, but I can't quite understand, Mr. Speaker, why my Republican friends continue to ignore this critically important issue. I hope it isn't because of their borderline pathological hatred of President Obama. I hope that it isn't because of the Big Oil special interests and the millions and millions of dollars they pour into Republican campaigns. Whatever the reason, I hope that future generations will forgive them, because this is something that we should have been addressing years and years and years ago, and the continued blocking of any serious attempts to deal with climate change by the majority in this House, I think, is unconscionable.

Having said that, Mr. Speaker, vote against the rule because it is not an open rule, and a lot of germane amendments--they were germane--were not made in order. I am glad one of the authors of the bill got his amendment made in order, but he authored the bill, so I guess he gets special preference. There is no reason why all of the amendments couldn't have been made in order, and there is no reason why this couldn't have been an open process, because we are not really doing much this week. As for this legislation we are dealing with here today, my guess is it ain't going anywhere.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

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

I want my colleagues to understand why I think we should reject this rule. Let me just mention two amendments that were germane and that were brought to the Rules Committee by our colleague from California (Mr. Garamendi).

One amendment clarifies that a viable merchant marine is in the public interest and should be taken into consideration when processing applications under section 3 of the Natural Gas Act. The other grants priority to the processing of approvals for LNG facilities that will be supplied with or will export LNG by U.S. flag vessels.

These are, basically, two amendments that are germane to this bill that would strengthen our shipping industry, and they were ruled out of order. For no reason, they were just randomly ruled out of order. Those are the kinds of things that Members of Congress do not have an opportunity to vote on when you close the process. Again, this is the most closed Congress in the history of our country--with more closed rules than any other Congress in history. So the tendency of this leadership, notwithstanding what the Speaker promised, which was to have a more open and transparent process, has been to become the most closed Congress in history.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to urge that we defeat the previous question, and if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up legislation that mirrors the bipartisan measure that overwhelmingly passed the Senate this month. It takes aim at some of the VA's most pressing problems, including the expansion of veterans' access to care, holding VA officials accountable, and increasing medical personnel and needed facilities.

This issue of the VA is something that we need to address. It is important, and it is something on which, I think, there is bipartisan agreement that we ought to focus on, and our use on this floor would be better spent dealing with that.

To discuss this proposal, I yield 3 minutes to the Congresswoman from Arizona (Mrs. Kirkpatrick).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McGOVERN. Let me just read one line here. It says:

Because H.R. 3301 would circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether cross-border pipelines and electric transmission facilities are in the natural interest by removing the Presidential permitting requirement, if presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto this bill.

So we are discussing--we are spending time here discussing a bill that will probably not be brought up at all in the Senate and will be vetoed by the White House. So this is just kind of an exercise in futility, when we should be here trying to figure out how to deal with some of the bigger issues like climate change.

If you don't want to talk about climate change, let's talk about increasing the minimum wage. If you don't want to talk about that, let's talk about extending unemployment insurance for people who have lost their jobs.

If you don't want to talk about that, let's talk about immigration reform. Let's talk about something that actually matters, something that--quite frankly, some of the things that are urgent for us to focus on.

Instead, we get these bills that are being brought before us, under a restrictive process, again, which is in keeping with the mindset of this Congress, which is closed.

Notwithstanding what the Speaker said, that there would be this new commitment to openness, this is now the most closed Congress in history.

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Arizona (Ms. Sinema).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

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

I find it somewhat interesting here that my colleague from Texas is all upset about the slowness of the permitting process when it comes to these pipelines.

I think that there is bipartisan concern about the way the VA is currently being managed. I think there is bipartisan concern that we ought to make sure that the system is more responsive to our veterans.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick came to the floor and offered a statement, which will be the subject of the previous question, that I think makes a lot of sense. I mean, what she is talking about is a bill that is the companion to the one that Senator McCain introduced in the United States Senate.

I am a little kind of bothered by the fact that there is not more impatience on the other side of the aisle to fix this VA system, to get it right. Again, you could point all the fingers you want at the administration, and they are trying to get it right.

There are things that we can do right now to more aggressively and quickly address some of these issues, and that is what Mrs. Kirkpatrick was talking about. That is what Ms. Sinema was talking about. That is what Senator McCain is talking about in the United States Senate, Senator Sanders as well.

That, to me, seems urgent. We ought to do this right now, and to kind of use the excuse that, well, we passed a couple of these things and maybe there will be a conference committee that will resolve all this stuff--let's just do it. Let's just get this done.

Again, I am going to urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question, so that we can bring up the very legislation that Mrs. Kirkpatrick and Ms. Sinema talked about.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

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

Let me just--I mean, there is just so much that I want to say here, given the fact that there is so much that we need to do to help the American people, and we are not doing it in this Congress.

We are bringing up kind of the same old-same old energy bills that are going nowhere, that don't respond to the needs of our country, and certainly don't address the issue of climate change.

My colleague talks about how the process is broken. He says the Keystone XL has taken 5 years and counting and that shows that the process is broken.

Let me just say that that project is a highly controversial project, with significant environmental impacts. Because the Obama administration took the time to do the environmental review, we have more information on the project's impacts on climate change.

The State Department's final environmental review found that tar sands produce significantly more carbon pollution than conventional oil, that building the Keystone XL pipeline could allow more rapid expansion of the tar sands, and that this expansion would exacerbate climate change. That is something that we can't afford to do.

Last month, our Nation's leading climate scientists released the country's third national climate assessment. The report confirms that climate change is real, is being caused by humans, and is already harming communities across America.

The report tells us the scientific evidence is unequivocal. The impacts are being felt in every region. They are growing more urgent, and they are going to get worse if we don't act.

A record drought is continuing to destroy crops in California. Torrential rains have flooded Florida. Wildfires are getting more intense. Coastal areas are being inundated as sea levels rise.

No sector of our economy, from oyster hatcheries on the West Coast to maple syrup producers in New England, are untouched. Business as usual is no longer an option. The same old-same old doesn't work.

If we are serious about taking action on climate change, saying no to the Keystone XL pipeline, to me, is an obvious place to start; and the pipeline would produce more carbon pollution than any other project pending in the United States.

The additional carbon pollution from this single project is equivalent to building seven new coal-fired power plants.

Now, if we can't say ``no'' to this project on climate grounds, where are we going to draw the line?

So I commend the Obama administration for taking the time to get this decision right.

The environment matters. For years, my friends on the other side of the aisle ignored the environment. I mean, it was always that the environmentalists were the enemy. You know, being good stewards of the environment was somehow a bad thing to do. Well, look at what is happening around us.

So I think it is time that there be a change of attitude, and it is time that we actually bring serious legislation to the floor that deals with, how do we meet our energy needs but how do we also deal with this issue of climate change?

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McGOVERN. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question, and I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule.

Again, I just want to remind my colleagues what we would like to bring up. If we defeat the previous question, we will bring up an amendment to the rule that brings legislation forward that mirrors the bipartisan measure that overwhelmingly passed in the Senate this month dealing with some of the VA's most pressing problems. So that is why defeating the previous question would be important.

Let me just close by saying, again, on the environmental issues here, listening to my friend from Texas talk about the issue of climate change, all you hear is excuses why we can't do something, and why we need to do the same old-same old.

I have to tell you that if we don't deal with this issue sooner, rather than later, then history will not look kindly upon us. We may not have a history in the future if we don't address this issue sooner, rather than later.

This is a big deal. This is a big deal. This is something that we ought to be talking about on the House floor at this very moment. If you want to talk about an energy policy, we ought to also talk about climate change. But yet there is nothing. There is nothing. It really is appalling.

And the legislation that is being brought before us today is going nowhere. So we are wasting our time talking about bills that are going nowhere. They are going nowhere in the Senate. The White House has already issued a veto threat. So we are just kind of spinning our wheels here.

Instead, maybe we could use this week to do something productive. If you defeat the previous question, we could actually bring up the Senate-passed VA bill and get that done and help our veterans. And get it done quickly. Maybe that would be a good thing to do. Maybe that would make this week worth it, rather than a week spent talking about things that are going nowhere.

So with that, Madam Speaker, I'm going to urge my colleagues again to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question. I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule. And I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source