National Energy Policy

NATIONAL ENERGY POLICY

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I rise to address the issue of prescription drugs as part of Medicare, a new provision dealing with Medicare, but before I do I will comment on the two issues that have been brought up by Democratic Members of the Senate. I only do that because I think it is appropriate people know that there are two sides to every story-maybe five sides but at least two in the Senate.

I do not find fault with my Democratic friends for bringing issues to the Senate floor, but in the case of the high cost of gasoline as an example, which the Senator from Oregon was talking about, all I can say is we had a national energy policy before the Senate. It passed the House last year; it passed the Senate last year. We spent a couple of months in conference and worked out a very good compromise. It passed the House of Representatives by a wide margin. Exactly how much I do not recall. Then it came to the Senate and we were faced with a filibuster.

In that filibuster cloture vote, we got 58 votes. It obviously takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster. Out of those 58 votes, we only had 13 out of 49 Democrats vote to break that filibuster. So there are another 36 Democrats that if they want to help us reduce the cost of energy, I would beg them to tell our leader that they are prepared to break that filibuster. The leader filed a motion to reconsider. We could bring that up again and within 2 minutes we would have a national energy policy that would send a clear signal to OPEC that we have our energy house in order in this country, and hopefully let them know they are not going to have an economic stranglehold on our economy as they evidently think they have by reducing their production of oil by 4 percent as they did a month ago.

Why would we not expect the OPEC nations to take advantage of a divided Congress when we all know, with the energy blackout in the Northeast last August and with $2 gasoline right now in the United States, that this country ought to be doing everything it can to solve its energy problem?

The national energy policy we had before Congress last fall that there was a Democrat filibuster against would be a solution because it emphasizes in a very balanced way three things: One, tax incentives for the enhanced production of fossil fuels; No. 2, tax incentives for renewable fuels, wind energy, ethanol, biodiesel, biomass; and tax incentives for conservation, such as fuel cell cars.

So when we have an effort to bring a national energy policy before this Congress, and it is defeated by a filibuster that only 13 out of 49 Democrats would support, then it seems to me very wrong for people on the other side of the aisle to be complaining about the high price of gasoline.

Now, it is all right to complain about the high price of gasoline because I do every time I go to fill up my car, but on the other hand, it is one thing to complain about it and not do anything about it. What we need to do is join forces to get this national energy bill passed. It would help if we could get two more Democrats to help us defeat that filibuster.