Federal Lands Jobs and Energy Security Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. Madam Chair, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for yielding.

Madam Chair, this bill, and the other two House bills we will consider this week, were put forward, in my opinion, to fill time. Yes, they are unifying issues on the Republican side of the aisle, Madam Chair, but they are not pressing. Even if they were good policy, they are not pressing.

We stand here without a budget. We stand here with 10 days left to go.

Madam Chair, it is now quarter of 3:00, and it was about 2:30, and our business is through for today. No budget, no unemployment insurance extension, no farm bill, no conference report even on the budget, no immigration bill, no ending discrimination, ENDA, bill--a raft of critically important issues that this House ought to be considering.

So this is somewhat the fiddle on which we are playing while Rome is burning.

We shut down the government for 16 days, for the first time in 17 years, a conscious decision to shut down government, and 147 of my Republican colleagues, Madam Chair, voted to keep the government shut down and voted against paying our bills. Yet, we consider this legislation.

Now, I am against this legislation substantively, but even more egregious is the wasting of 4 of the 12 days we had available to address the issues I have just discussed. America is rightfully disgusted with the Congress of the United States. Me too.

Energy security remains an important issue. I agree with my colleagues on that. But these bills offer partisan solutions to energy production that are taking our time away from pressing matters, as I have explained, like the budget conference, unemployment insurance, comprehensive immigration reform, the farm bill, Medicare physician payment formula, and tax extenders.

We are all going to be wringing our hands just a few days from now saying, Of course we want to make sure there is a doc fix so that people with Medicare can make sure their doctors are paid appropriately so they will continue to serve them. We will say, Of course we want to do that.

Well, why did you waste a week?

We won't have an answer to that, unless the answer is, Well, we are really not going to address them; we would rather address these issues that bring our party together and make us look like we are doing the work that our base wants us to do.

Tomorrow's legislation seeks to block a proposed Bureau of Land Management regulation that is not even yet in effect and overreaches to cover all Interior Department lands.

The first of these bills sets an arbitrary deadline on leases, permits, and reviews that stand in the way of regulators doing their job to protect citizens and

affected communities.

I think citizens want to be protected. Yes, they want it done in an efficient, effective manner, but they want to be protected.

These bills were put forward in the name of achieving energy security, when, in truth, ironically, America is now more energy secure than it has been in decades.

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Mr. HOYER. We are more energy independent than we have been in decades. As a matter of fact, when I talk about the Make It In America agenda of making manufacturing jobs and making things here in this country, one of our assets is, we are the abundant energy supply in the world today. There are more oil rigs in America today than the rest of the world combined.

Yet, we are talking about energy security. We have it. Do we need to enhance it? Of course. Just days ago, the Energy Information Administration announced that we produced more crude oil last month, Madam Chair, than we imported for the first time in almost 20 years. Under President Obama, oil production is up, and we now have more rigs operating, as I said, than the rest of the world combined.

Domestic natural gas extraction has also grown to an all-time record, and energy companies already hold more than 20 million acres of public land onshore on which they have yet to produce oil or gas. That is 56 percent of leased public lands onshore. The gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt) was speaking of that.

These bills distract and delay this body's critical attention to the issues of critical concern to all America, and, yes, indeed, to the rest of the world that wants to see and needs a responsible, fiscally secure America.

No budget, no budget conference, no farm bill, no immigration bill, no ENDA bill, all which passed the Senate in a bipartisan fashion. They are worthy of debate. That doesn't mean either side has to agree, but that is what we ought to be debating, ladies and gentlemen of this House, because they are the critical issues confronting us before the end of this year.

Yet, we waste our time, and frankly, we let ourselves off early because we don't have enough work to do.

I urge opposition to these three bills. I urge the majority party to bring the important pieces of legislation to the floor that America needs.

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