American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008

Floor Speech

AMERICAN HOUSING RESCUE AND FORECLOSURE PREVENTION ACT OF 2008 -- (Senate - June 24, 2008)

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I actually applaud the Senator from Nevada in trying to move this amendment onto this bill. I say that knowing some of my colleagues on this side of the aisle are frustrated, but the American people are frustrated with the high costs of energy. They want us to be doing all we can to try to help alleviate those energy bills that are going to be affecting them not just this summer but next winter as they see higher home heating bills.

The Senator from Nevada and I are trying to say to our colleagues, it is important not to have this energy legislation tied up in a larger bill that is not currently moving before we adjourn for the July recess.

We are already seeing jobs being canceled, projects being canceled, people laid off, and generation not being ready to be put onto the grid to help assist with high energy costs, particularly in the area of natural gas.

The underlying amendment Senator Ensign and I are talking about giving tax credits to individual homeowners so they can make improvements to their homes, and it can result in more than a 20-percent savings in their heating bills this winter. Those are improvements, I guarantee you, we need to be making because many people in the Northeast are not going to be able to afford the high energy costs they are going to be seeing.

In addition, it puts additional megawatts onto the grid, not just in 2008, 2009, but for many decades to come. We need to diversify off the high costs of natural gas. The point is that natural gas costs are continuing to rise with other pressures. We need to diversify off of natural gas and coal as the primary source for our electricity grid. The fact is this produces and saves about $20 billion in natural gas because of the production we would get onto the electricity grid. We need to be doing this now.

We already know the result of our delay, that we have cost jobs in America, projects have been canceled, people have been laid off. We already know it is costing us in lost time and investment to stimulate our economy, and now we know it is also going to cost us in higher energy rates to our consumers. So I am for any plan that will get this energy legislation untangled from other bills and actually approved by the House and the Senate. My colleague and I are willing to work across the aisle and across the Rotunda with people who have any ideas how to get this done--either paid for or not paid for.

But we simply cannot stand here today and say this is a vehicle that should move without trying to put this housing and energy package together, since it is the underlying bill, and we do think it is stimulative to the economy.

I say to my colleagues that the return on investment of this investment in energy is a far greater ROI than some of the other stimulative activities we have done. So if we want to be true to our consumers' anxiety about the high cost of energy they are seeing, not only in gasoline but what they think is coming ahead, then we need to move. We need to stop holding up good energy legislation while we are trying to use it to get other legislation.

I hope we can pass this bill out of the Senate before we leave for the July recess.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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