Granting Subpoena Power to Commission Investigating BP Deepwater Oil Spill

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Mr. FLEMING. I thank the gentleman from Washington for the time.

Madam Speaker, I stand in favor of H.R. 5481, which gives subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

As we stand here today, oil is still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, and 242 miles of Louisiana shoreline are impacted by this oil. The highest priority for us must be to stop this leak and to get this mess cleaned up. BP must be held 100 percent accountable for their actions, and the administration must be accountable for their role in the response and oversight. Many questions are still without answers, the most pressing being what went wrong.

The bill we have before us today would provide subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. This commission has been tasked by the President with providing recommendations on how we can prevent and mitigate the impact of any future spills that result from offshore drilling. Future tragedies that we are currently experiencing can only be prevented if we know what went wrong. We must find out who made the mistakes, who made the erroneous judgment, what failed, and just exactly what went wrong.

I will also interject, Madam Speaker, that, in operations like this, there are many backup systems; there are many redundancies. So, for a tragedy and a disaster like this to happen, there had to be gross error and gross negligence. This sort of thing just doesn't happen out of whole cloth.

I will support the bill today, but I share the concerns raised by my colleagues on the scope of the subpoena authority. I will voice my own concern and will urge Congress, this commission, and the administration to keep their eye on the ball to resolve the crisis affecting my State and our country and not to use this as an opportunity to advance an agenda, to shut down offshore drilling, or to impose a national energy tax.

The people of Louisiana have been hurt enough by BP's failures and by the inability of the administration to timely and effectively deal with this disaster. The last thing we need is the Federal Government's adding to this disaster by crippling one of the largest economic drivers in my State of Louisiana. The moratorium imposed by the administration would do just that. A Federal judge recently temporarily stayed the moratorium, affirming that it would cause irreparable harm. Any action by the administration, by this commission, and by this Congress must be based on science and not politics. Let's get the answers to what happened in order to stop the oil, to clean up the gulf, and to help Louisiana.

Also, I want to point out a couple of things on this bill about the actors in this situation. First of all, I want to say that I condemn BP and its actions. It is very clear that BP was negligent, if not criminal, in its actions by putting profits ahead of safety.

Let's talk about the administration for a moment. The administration failed to address well-known problems with the Minerals Management Service even well into the first 18 months of the administration. It held off high-volume skimmers from other countries that were offered within 3 days of the disaster. They barely acknowledged the spill for 9 days. They did not give permission for berm construction for almost 60 days in my home State of Louisiana. They repeatedly stopped emergency cleanup operations for trivial or unknown reasons, and that is happening even today. They repeatedly slapped moratoria, as I mentioned before, on offshore drilling that is over 500 feet, which is not, truly, deep water, and when all of the experts on this panel said that it was perfectly safe to do so.

I would like to say there is one silver lining in this entire situation, and that is my own Governor, Governor Jindal. Governor Jindal has been standing point each day in this process, doing everything that a Governor should do and must do while our President is on the golf course and while, of course, the CEO of BP is out on a yacht.

So I just want to say, in summary, Madam Speaker, that I do support H.R. 5481. This is one step in many toward finding out what happened here. We do need subpoena power to find out every bit of this, which will be going on for years, but so will the cleanup and so will the impact on my State of Louisiana, which at this point means that our tourism industry and our fisheries will be devastated, and now that the moratorium is shutting down 33 rigs, it is devastating our economy and our jobs.

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