Domestic Energy Strategy

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend from Ohio, who also loves Boudin, for yielding and for bringing up this important issue of energy.

Mr. Speaker, American energy means jobs. When we come here on this House floor and talk about ways to get our economy moving again, ways to help Americans who want to get back to work, there is a very clear-cut, commonsense answer to get our economy moving again, and that is just to open up more of the resources of this great Nation.

Just on the placard right there above us, Mr. Speaker, inscribed on the walls of this House Chamber is a plaque that starts off, that says, ``Let us develop the resources of our land.'' It is on the House Chamber.

And, yet, President Obama, through his policies, through his radical regulations--every single day his unelected bureaucrats wake up figuring out more ways to close off those resources, to kill those American jobs.

When my colleagues come here on the House floor and tell story after story about things like the war on coal, these are real wars that this Obama administration is waging upon American workers.

The war on coal is real. I have seen it in the eyes of coal workers when I went to my colleague's district in Ohio. We sat out before a whole room full of coal workers, many of them multi-generational. These aren't people who have their first job in the industry. For many of them, their father, their grandfather, worked in the coal industry.

When you look out at coal workers today, as I saw in Eastern Ohio, you see the look of fear, not because they face global competition. They can beat global competition. What they can't beat right now is the barrage of radical regulations coming from the Obama administration killing American jobs.

It has got a real direct impact on workers across this country, people who are part of the middle class today that the President loves talking about. Yet, that middle class dream is under attack by these policies.

They have real impacts, Mr. Speaker. In fact, one of the other things I went out and saw when I was out in Eastern Ohio, was the Utica shale play, another example of great American ingenuity.

These aren't just American jobs. This is American ingenuity that is figuring out how to explore new areas of energy, to allow us not only to create good jobs in America, but to be completely energy independent, to export our energy to other countries, including some of our friends in the world, our allies around the world right now that have to get energy from countries like Russia, who use energy as a weapon against those very countries who would love to get energy from America.

What is the President's answer to them? The President's answer is to make it more difficult to create that energy here through rules, through regulations.

What are some real examples? Just this week, Mr. Speaker, the President is in Paris not to talk about ways to combat ISIS and the global threat of terrorism.

The President is over in Paris talking about global warming. As people are walking around this town in parkas right now because it is so cold, the President is trying to focus on ways to make our economy in America less competitive globally.

So this week we are bringing up more legislation to push back on those kind of regulations. One example is later this week, under the Congressional Review Act, we are going to be bringing up legislation to reverse President Obama's new source performance standard.

This was one of the many radical rules coming out of the EPA. One of the biggest threats to jobs in America is the unelected bureaucrats over the EPA who have another brilliant idea, again, dreamed up by people that are unelected, that now have a plan to actually make it more difficult to create electricity in America, not only more difficult, Mr. Speaker, but dramatically more expensive for hardworking taxpayers in this country to buy electricity. So we are going to bring up a bill on the House floor this week to reverse that radical regulation.

As we bring that up, we are going to have this debate about something very specific in terms of a policy brought up by the President that is going to make it much harder for our country to be competitive, much harder for middle class families to achieve that American Dream, because it is going to make things more expensive for

them, things that they buy, not just their electricity, but it cascades into all the other things that people buy when they go to grocery stores, when they go do their Christmas shopping. These are having real impacts on real people.

Something else we are going to be taking on is the Department of the Interior right now, one of the other agencies of President Obama, coming out with a well control rule that is going to make it very difficult to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, a place where we, through American ingenuity, have figured out ways to generate more energy in America that we can use not only to help our economy, but to help our friends all around the world.

So what is the President's answer? Using unelected bureaucrats, once again, to propose a rule that is going to make it more difficult to create those American jobs.

Then, of course, as my colleague from Ohio was talking about, this week we are also going to bring up a bill called the Architecture of Abundance, a bill to create more American jobs, to create real American energy security, again, to open up those natural resources that are being shut down by this President.

So when you talk about getting the economy back on track, you don't need a team of economists to come in and figure out some new way to invent the wheel.

Mr. Speaker, the answer is sitting right underneath our feet. In many cases, it is the energy that is trapped, not trapped by the lack of ingenuity, because Americans, more than anybody in the world, have figured out great ways to go and use technology, to go and get those resources, attract those resources, explore and then produce those resources.

But, unfortunately, their biggest challenge every day is not the competition from other States, not the competition from other companies. It is the challenge of the threatening regulations from this Obama administration that are trying to shut those opportunities down. It has real impacts on real people, the coal industry, the oil industry, the natural gas industry, all across the board.

When our allies around the world are looking to us and saying, ``We want to trade with the United States,'' we want to be able to buy the oil that America is generating, that we have now a surplus of and, yet, the President wants to issue a veto threat when we say let's allow for exporting of oil, for goodness sake.

We have an abundance of it. People are getting laid off in the United States, those middle class workers that the President loves talking about at photo-ops, who are being laid off because of his policies.

We have got the technology. We have got the expertise. We are the world leader, Mr. Speaker. All we need is for the right policies to unleash that potential, to unleash that opportunity, to create those American jobs.

So as we have been talking about tonight, the House will actually be taking action--not sitting on the sidelines, not just criticizing, but taking action--bringing bills on the House floor this week to open up those opportunities for hardworking taxpayers, to create more middle class opportunities for people who want to be a part of this industry, but also to lower costs for these middle class families who are struggling under these tough economic times to be able to have more opportunities for themselves and their families.

Hopefully, we will continue this debate throughout this week and throughout the rest of this Congress as we bring these good pieces of legislation to open up those resources again, as the placard says at the top of the House Chamber here, to develop the resources of this land so that America can be the world leader in energy.

So we don't have to get our energy from countries who don't like us, but we can actually export and create more job opportunities and help our allies around the world by undermining countries like Iran and Russia and others who want to do them harm.

I look forward to continuing this debate. I am so proud to be a part of this effort in the House to create more energy opportunities in America.

I thank my colleague from Ohio for leading in this effort.

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