Ending the Gas Price Crisis

Floor Speech

ENDING THE GAS PRICE CRISIS -- (Senate - July 31, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, we are going to have a vote on the motion to proceed to the Defense authorization bill. The distinguished occupant of the chair, myself, and Senator Martinez all sit on the Armed Services Committee. We know how important this legislation is. I have every confidence that we will ultimately--at least I sure hope--get to and pass a Defense authorization bill.

I will point out that for the last 2 weeks, we have had a series of attempts by the majority to get us off the single most important issue facing the country today, and that is high energy prices, particularly high gasoline prices. My expectation is that this attempt, which will now make this No. 7 instead of 6, will fail as well because on this side of the aisle we believe we should not leave here, we should not adjourn for the August recess without addressing this pressing issue.

It touches everybody in the country, rich or poor, regardless of circumstances in life. It is also driving up the price of food and threatening inflation which is going to threaten our economy regardless of what we do on housing and the subprime mortgage crisis.

I ask the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire if he has some thoughts about what we ought to be doing between now and the time we adjourn for the August recess.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas. I wanted to join with him today in addressing this issue because at least in New Hampshire--and I suspect it is true in Texas, too, even though maybe in a different way--the No. 1 issue on the minds of the people is the cost of energy. They are concerned about it when they fill up their car with gasoline, but they are even more concerned about it heading into the winter.

People in New Hampshire anticipate winters. We know it is coming. There is not much we can do about it. It is coming. We also know that 60 to 70 percent of the homes in New Hampshire--maybe more--are heated by oil. The price of oil that has to be put in the tanks in order to heat homes has doubled or tripled. A lot of families in New Hampshire, low-income families, but also moderate income families, are going to be extraordinarily stressed to try to meet that energy need and the price of that energy.

There are a lot of things that you can maybe do to change your lifestyle. You can maybe drive a little less. Maybe you can take a bus; not so much in New Hampshire because there are not a lot of city areas that have bus districts, although we do have some. But you can adjust your driving. You can downsize your car so you use less gasoline. But if you have a home and you have a family, there is nothing you can do about it. You have to heat that home. You have to stay warm in the winter when the temperature is at zero or even minus degrees and the wind chill is certainly at minus degrees. To do that takes a lot of energy and takes oil. So people are scared. They are scared about how they are going to heat their homes.

I believe my No. 1 responsibility as their representative in Washington is try to do something about bringing down the price of that energy. How do we do that? In my opinion, we do it by at least voting in the Senate on the issue of expanding our supply in the United States, with American energy, while also conserving more. Yet we have been blocked now. As the Senator from Texas points out, this will be the seventh time the Democratic Party and the Democratic leadership has tried to move the Congress and the Senate off the issue of trying to bring down oil prices, bring down gasoline prices by expanding American sources and American production by allowing us to drill offshore, by allowing us to use oil shale, by allowing us to expand nuclear power, by allowing us to put an effort into the development of electric cars, by doing a whole series of things.

Seven times now the Democratic leadership here has said, no, they do not want to hear about this. They want to talk about issues that are important, but they are nowhere near the importance, at least to my constituents, of what it costs them to fill up their gasoline tanks and what it is going to cost them to fill up their oil tanks this winter.

I cannot think of a higher priority as a Congress than to take up this Energy bill and have some votes on these very important issues of whether we open more drilling offshore, whether we use more oil shale, whether we expand our efforts to try to bring online nuclear powerplants, whether we continue our efforts to try to expand electric cars.

The Senator from Texas hit the nail on the head. We need to act on these issues, and we should stop this obfuscation which is occurring on the other side of the aisle on this issue.

We should get to the essence of the issue, which is produce more American energy.

Mr. CORNYN. I appreciate the Senator from New Hampshire addressing that issue. I have always been amazed that those who say we ought to do something to help poor people who need help with their heating oil are the same folks who seem to be the most resistant to opening America's reserves of natural resources which would have the effect of bringing down oil prices for everybody. It seems to me that would be one of the most commonsense things we could do.

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