Lowering the Cost of Energy

Floor Speech

LOWERING THE COST OF ENERGY -- (Senate - July 23, 2008)

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I notice my good friend from Nevada did not mention T. Boone Pickens' views on whether speculation is a part of the problem. Republicans are perfectly happy to have a speculation component of the overall issue. But if we are in the business of quoting T. Boone Pickens, I had a chance to meet with him for an hour on Monday. He told me, without equivocation, he did not think speculation had anything to do with this particular runup. I do not know whether it does. I think most of my Members are in favor of transparency. We want to put more cops on the beat to make sure the markets are working properly. But if we are quoting Pickens, I am sure I will be safe in saying Pickens would not be voting for this bill that the majority leader thinks is the way we ought to go.

Right now in Lexington, KY, and Las Vegas, NV, and every other city and town across the country, Americans are hurting from high gas prices. Right now, there is a man watching his hard-earned paycheck go into his gas tank instead of his daughter's college fund. That man doesn't care about cloture motions or second-degree amendments; he wants Congress to do something. He wants us to act.

We have all heard the frustrations from constituents literally for months. They have made their feelings known. So we were surprised yesterday to learn about the intentions of our friends across the aisle when it comes to high gas prices. The majority leader told reporters that voting on more than one amendment per side--this is in some ways almost laughable--voting on more than one amendment per side on the No. 1 domestic issue facing our Nation is unreasonable.

Let me repeat that. Our friends on the other side are saying that having a real debate and considering good ideas from all sides is too much for the Senate to handle. They have apparently rejected the idea of finding a serious solution to high gas prices. Instead, they want us to take up a proposal that is designed to fail. They want us to try to fool our constituents into believing we are addressing this problem in a serious way, when everyone knows we are not.

It is no surprise that the Democratic leadership won't allow Americans' top priorities to be heard. It is the same reason they have been canceling hearings and markups all week. They don't want to choose between their Presidential nominee--whose position on bringing down gas prices is: No, we can't--and the demands of the guy at the gas pump who is watching his daughter's college fund shrink with every gallon he puts in the tank.

It is a sad commentary, given the propositions they made. Our friends across the aisle promised a year-and-a-half ago in their ``Six for 06'' pledge to lower gas prices and to free America from dependence on foreign oil, but things didn't turn out exactly as planned. The fact is, a gallon of gas is now $1.70 higher than it was when the new majority took over and promised to lower it. At a time when Americans are clamoring for them to make good on their pledge, they must muster the political will to do something about it. We should not be content to leave town after a couple of failed votes and a speculation proposal that no serious economist in America believes will have a significant impact by itself on the price of gas.

Let me reiterate. The Republicans believe we can strengthen the futures markets. Our bill would do just that--the Gas Price Reduction Act. If bad actors are out there, we would like to find them by putting more cops on the beat and by bringing greater transparency to the market, but we don't claim this provision alone will solve the problem. No serious person would claim that. The other side has made the astonishing claim that the speculation provision alone will lower the price of gas by 20 to 50 percent. Yet I have found no one--not the chairman of the Federal Reserve, not the 27-nation International Energy Agency, not even the most famous rich Democrat in America, Warren Buffett--to back up that claim.

Yesterday, our colleague, the junior Senator from Texas, asked here on the floor for any citation backing up such a claim. My good friend the majority leader came back to the floor to respond, but the only person he could name who had made this claim had been so thoroughly discredited here in the Senate that the Democratic chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a stinging 11-page rebuttal of his recent testimony. In testimony before the committee, the majority leader's source--a lawyer, not an economist--claimed that ``overnight,'' the speculation bill dealing with energy commodities would ``bring down the price of crude oil, I believe, by 25 percent.''

The committee's public response to this notion of an overnight reduction of 25 percent was blunt. Here is what the committee had to say:

There is no credible evidence that simply amending the Commodities Exchange Act to regulate energy commodities as if they were agricultural commodities will lead to lower energy prices.

So in other words, the one source our friends across the aisle point to when they claim their bill will lower the cost of energy by 20 to 50 percent is the subject of an 11-page, bipartisan rebuke which says there is zero credible evidence to support his claim.

Mr. President, I commend to my colleagues the report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Let me say it again: We, as do our friends, support legislation that keeps bad actors from driving up gas prices. We have addressed this in our own bill, the gas price reduction bill, but serious people understand that if this activity is occurring, it is a small portion of the overall problem.

This leads me to a broader point. The price of gas at the pump is a serious national problem that requires a serious legislative response. We cannot solve this problem with timid, half-hearted measures. We need to act boldly, and that means we need to consider good ideas from both sides, as we have typically done when dealing with the biggest issues in the country. Now is not the time to be timid or to play political games that are designed to benefit a single party. Our job, it seems to me, is to help the man or woman at the gas pump who is making hard choices in order to keep his gas tank full. That is why it is so irresponsible to shortchange this debate. Until we have acted boldly to cut gas prices and our reliance on Middle East oil, we will be ignoring the demands of the American people.

So it is time to be serious about this problem. No more unsupportable outlandish claims, no more relying on discredited testimony, no more canceling markups simply to avoid taking votes on a serious approach to lowering the price of gas at the pump.

We need to find more and we need to use less, and we need to start now. We need to consider good ideas from all sides, and we need to take seriously that energy is the No. 1 domestic issue facing our Nation. We simply can't go through a failed process, claim credit for trying, and then pack up and go home. Let's get serious. Let's open this debate to more than one good idea rather than bring it to a premature conclusion, and let's find a solution that incorporates increased domestic supply as well as conservation. We need to find more and use less, and the American people are simply demanding no less from us.

I see the Senator from New Hampshire is here.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, would the Republican leader yield for a question?

Mr. McCONNELL. I am happy to yield to my friend from New Hampshire.

Mr. GREGG. As I understand the proposal from the Democratic leader, it would not allow an amendment, for example, on oil shale. As I understand it, the Democratic proposal suggests that we use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That would give us an estimated 3.5 days of oil. Were we to be able to extract oil shale, as I understand it, we would have the potential for 40,000 days of oil.

I guess my question to the Republican leader is if we are going to have a comprehensive energy policy, shouldn't we at least take up the issue of whether the restrictions which have been placed on the ability to use oil--which restrictions have been offered by the Democratic Party--shouldn't an amendment on that issue be allowed, as well as an amendment on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf?

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I say to my friend from New Hampshire, of course. That moratorium was installed by this new majority last year to shut down this promising new source that we have right here in our country, some have estimated as much oil as the entire reserves in Saudi Arabia times three.

Mr. GREGG. I appreciate the Republican leader's answer on that.

Mr. REID addressed the Chair.

Mr. McCONNELL. I believe I have the floor, Mr. President.

Mr. REID. The Senator was not talking.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I also have a question for the minority leader.

Mr. McCONNELL. I am happy to yield.

Mr. KYL. I am trying to understand basically the differences between the proposals that have been put forth by the majority leader and by the minority leader in terms of unanimous consent requests. As I understand it, they basically boil down to the following, and I wonder if the Senator could confirm this for me.

What the majority leader has said is there could be either one amendment--or possibly two, I am not clear--but that they would pit the two sides against each other; that is, a Democratic proposal and a Republican proposal.

What I believe the minority leader has suggested is that we engage in what Senators call the regular order, which is a process of debate and proposals for amendments which would try to build a bill with amendments that could actually be adopted by both sides--or by Members on either side, let me put it that way--rather than simply having two party positions, neither of which could win 60 votes, would fail, and therefore we would end up with nothing. What the minority leader is suggesting is a process by which both Democrats and Republicans could offer ideas--pieces of the puzzle, as it were--that could appeal to Members on both sides in such a way that a bill could eventually be built and passed to actually do something about this energy crisis and the high cost of oil; is that correct?

Mr. McCONNELL. I think my friend from Arizona is correct. What I proposed to the majority leader and to the Senate--to which he objected, unfortunately--was that we proceed on this measure related to the subject that is most on the minds of the American people in a way entirely consistent with the way we have dealt with energy in the past when it wasn't the No. 1 issue in the country.

Last year when we were on an energy measure, the way we proceeded involved 15 days on the floor, it involved 16 rollcall votes and the adoption of 49 amendments. I say to my friend from Arizona, at that time gasoline was way too high, but it wasn't nearly as high as it is now. It was $3.06 a gallon; now it is about a dollar a gallon higher. That was in this Congress.

In 2005, when our party was in the majority, we passed an energy bill, and we spent 10 days on the floor. At that time gas was $2.26 a gallon. We had 19 rollcall votes, 57 amendments were adopted, and we passed the bill.

So if we were treating the subject of energy in a credible way consistent with Senate traditions in 2005 when it wasn't the No. 1 issue and in 2007 when it wasn't the No. 1 issue in the country, my thought is why in the world would we be trying to do something less than that--something that doesn't give all Senators, many of whom have good ideas to propose on both sides of the aisle, an opportunity to craft a proposal that gets at the No. 1 issue in the country. That is what my unanimous consent request would have allowed. I proffered it a while ago. It was objected to. It would have allowed us to have energy-related amendments only, I would say to my friend from Arizona, that we would rotate from side to side--a Republican amendment and then a Democratic amendment--and we wouldn't put a sort of arbitrary timeline on ending the discussion prematurely before we had dealt with the problem.

Mr. REID addressed the Chair.

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I believe the Senator from New Hampshire----

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Republican leader has the floor under leadership time.

Mr. GREGG. I was wondering if the Republican leader would entertain another question.

Mr. McCONNELL. I would be happy to yield to my friend from New Hampshire for a question.

Mr. GREGG. The Republican leader has made the point that we need to have a good piece of legislation, something that can be bipartisan in the area of drilling. Hopefully, we can also have an equally bipartisan effort in the area of oil shale.

Isn't it also likely we could probably have a bipartisan amendment on the issue of how we bring more nuclear power online, and shouldn't that be considered as part of any energy solution, because it addresses the environmental concerns which the Democratic leader spoke of so well relative to making sure we have clean energy? Shouldn't that also be part of any package such as this? Isn't it also totally reasonable that we could allow these types of amendments and do it in a fairly orderly way and in a quick way within this week, and certainly within next week, which is a small amount of time and certainly a reasonable amount of time, considering the fact that the American people continue to pay such extraordinary fees at the gas pump and expect us to act?

Mr. McCONNELL. I say to my friend from New Hampshire that under the consent agreement I proffered, to which there was an objection lodged by the majority leader, such an amendment would have been entirely appropriate, and as he suggests, entirely consistent with the subject that I know my good friend, the majority leader, cares deeply about.

He brought up in the Senate a climate change measure back in the first week of June--something he obviously felt was important. We spent a number of days on it. Many people feel nuclear power is one of the best solutions to the climate change issue, an entirely relevant subject to energy, and would have been permitted under the consent agreement that I offered earlier.

So I think the point is well made, that it is the kind of amendment you would normally expect in the Senate on the biggest issue in the country to be offering, debating, and voting on.

I see my friend from Texas.

Mrs. HUTCHISON. Would the distinguished minority leader yield for a question?

Mr. McCONNELL. I am happy to yield for a question.

Mrs. HUTCHISON. I have been listening to the colloquy and the questions and the urging all of us have been making to have an open amendment process.

I wonder if the Republican leader, the Senator from Kentucky, is aware that we actually have a vehicle that would increase production, and the process could be done immediately, and that is through the appropriations bills that have been steadily marked up by the Appropriations Committee. But is the leader aware that the markup for Thursday was canceled?

It was canceled because the Interior appropriations bill, which has the moratorium against offshore drilling and shale production, is in that bill, and there was going to be an amendment offered by myself and Senators DOMENICI and BOND to take that moratorium off so that we could do something for the American people to bring the price down and start production and use our own resources. But that markup was canceled. I wanted to see if the leader was aware of that and what possible reasons could there be for not having the opportunity, again, to address this issue of production.

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I might say to my friend from Texas that I was surprised to learn that not only was the meeting canceled, the rationale for canceling the meeting was announced by the chairman as being precisely what the Senator from Texas suggests, which was the avoidance of having to vote on the question of offshore drilling.

The last two surveys I looked at--one is a Fox survey and one a CNN survey--indicated that over 70 percent of the American people believe we ought to move in previously off-limits offshore areas to increase American production. I was surprised to see that the chairman of the committee doesn't want to allow a vote on that. It strikes me that there is a lot of dodging and weaving going on here to try to avoid voting on the things the American people are clearly asking us to do.

I thank the Senator from Texas for raising that issue. Does she have another question?

Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I would just say that the Appropriations Committee and this Senate have had a tradition of bipartisan participation, and there is a great bipartisan bill for the Interior to be able to go forward, and we have the chance to address the issues of the congressional moratorium in a bipartisan way. There is no other bar to being able to let the States explore on the Outer Continental Shelf, and the States that have oil shale reserves, to be able to open those, and that bipartisan spirit has been in the Appropriations Committee.

So I just saw that we have this opportunity on the Senate floor right now to work all weekend, with amendments, deciding what the majority of the Senate wants to do. We have something that is an opportunity that I hope we will take, and that is to let the American people see the debate and let the American people decide if we have some proposals that would increase production, and would that in fact bring down the price of oil and gasoline at the pump right now.

Mr. McCONNELL. The appropriations process has certainly been used in the past to achieve the opposite result. I believe the process was used last year to put a moratorium on going forward with the development of oil shale, much of which is found in Utah. I see our friend from Utah. So it is not at all inappropriate, it strikes me, for the appropriations process to consider the other side of the equation, which is to actually provide additional domestic production.

It is pretty clear what is going on here, I say to my friend from Texas. There is a great effort to avoid having the Senate go on record on the issues that are on the minds of the American people, that they believe--I think correctly--would take us in the direction of moving toward energy independence, which is something that clearly has not been accomplished.

Mr. President, this is an important debate which I and most of my Members think we ought to continue to be on for many days, and to try to achieve an accomplishment for the American people that would make a difference. I don't think we should be afraid of this issue. That is what the Senate is here to do--grapple with the big issues confronting the country. This is the biggest one. It is time that we dealt with it.

I yield the floor.

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