Granting Subpoena Power to Commission Investigating BP Deepwater Oil Spill

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY of Massachusetts. I thank the chairman very much. I thank him for his excellent work and for his timely hearings on this catastrophic event.

I thank the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps) for her excellent work on this indispensable piece of legislation and for working together in a bipartisan fashion with the minority to ensure that we have an historically accurate assessment of what has happened in the Gulf of Mexico.

Madam Speaker, President Obama established a bipartisan National Commission to investigate the causes of the BP disaster through Executive order. However, the President does not have the authority to give the commission subpoena power. That requires the Congress to act.

BP's response continues to be marked by catastrophic failures. Just today, an accident with an underwater recovery at the bottom of the sea has forced BP to remove the containment cap, and oil is now gushing into the ocean at a rate of 25,000 to 50,000 barrels per day. BP's mistakes seem to be without end.

BP said the rig couldn't sink. It did. BP said they could respond to an Exxon Valdez-sized spill every day. They couldn't. BP initially claimed that the oil spill was 1,000 barrels a day. It wasn't. BP knew it. Internal BP documents show that, in the first week of the disaster, BP estimated the size of the spill could be as high as 14,000 barrels per day. It took BP 23 days to finally agree to release video footage of the oil spill. Even then, BP initially only released video of one of the 12 remote operating vehicles on the ocean floor.

All along, it seems that BP has been much more concerned about its own liability--they pay a fine per barrel of oil per day--than they have been with the livability of the Gulf of Mexico and with the livelihoods of the people who are dependent upon the Gulf of Mexico for their livings.

BP's actions raise significant concerns about whether it will fully cooperate with the commission. We need to ensure that neither BP, Halliburton, Transocean nor any other party could prevent the commission from getting to the bottom of what went wrong at the bottom of the ocean on April 20, 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon exploded.

Congress has granted subpoena power to Presidential commissions investigating national crises in the past, including the Kemeny Commission, which investigated the disaster at Three Mile Island, and the 9/11 Commission.

As the worst environmental disaster in our Nation's history continues to unfold in the gulf, the American people and the people of the gulf coast deserve answers so that we can prevent similar disasters in the future. This legislation will ensure that the National Commission has the power it needs to get those answers for the American people.

We have to make sure that this never happens again. We have to make sure that the lessons learned are implemented. If the oil industry is going to drill in ultradeep waters, we have to ensure that it is ultrasafe and that there is an ultrafast response that can, in fact, ensure that there is a minimization of the harm done to the residents of the gulf. Every oil company now says they have no capacity to respond ultrafast to a catastrophic event the size of what is happening in the gulf right now. We have to make sure that none of this occurs again. Only with the subpoena power can we understand everything that happened--only with the passage of that today.

Again, I urge all Members to cast an ``aye'' vote.

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