Keystone XL Pipeline Act
Floor Speech
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Ms. CANTWELL. I thank the Senator from Rhode Island. We are here tonight because we haven't ended debate on the Keystone Pipeline bill. We haven't ended debate because our colleagues voted to not end debate on this important measure, and I think for good reason.
Our colleagues from both sides of the aisle got to offer amendments last week, to discuss them, and have a chance to vote on them. I would say this is a very different process from what happened in December, where basically an up-or-down vote was going to be given on a process.
So I am glad my colleagues--like from Michigan where they had a major tar sands spill in their State--who want to offer amendments on pipeline safety can do so. I want my colleagues to be able to offer amendments as it relates to security and safety, particularly when it relates to safe drinking water and the issues of the pipeline.
Since this bill has been introduced, two major pipeline spills have been discovered. So just within the time we have been on this bill, 3 million gallons of brine spilled from a pipeline in North Dakota. That was discovered on January 6, the same day we started with this bill being introduced.
On Friday North Dakota officials discovered that the contamination from the spill reached the Missouri River. So on January 17, 30,000 gallons of oil were spilled into the Yellowstone River, a different incident, from a pipeline that broke in Eastern Montana. It temporarily shut down drinking water services for 6,000 people in Glendive, MT. So you bet these issues are important to me, and they are important to my colleagues. I hope we do not have to rush through the process of having a vote on these amendments. I think all of my colleagues see the Thursday night event, where the discussion was, let's get four or five amendments or six pending amendments and then coming back 1 hour later to table them is not the kind of legislative process we are used to here.
I hope in the next couple of days my colleague and I can work on these in a much more productive fashion, with the list of amendments that Members want to offer and a timely way to debate them. Hopefully my colleague from Alaska and I could actually work with our colleagues, and either get some of them accepted or work for a vote schedule that would actually allow us to have the vote and have the debate as opposed to tabling.
This Senator is not arguing that any side does not have a right to table an amendment. I am simply saying: I think colleagues want to know what the process is going to be and whether they can discuss this.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a story that is about one of those pipeline spills. It is about the Federal Government issuing warnings to the pipeline company in November about the concerns regarding those spills.
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Ms. CANTWELL. To me this is an issue where we have had some debate about the pipeline and the oilspill liability trust fund. I would hope we would come back to that issue because these issues about spills and safety and security should be part of the debate. But I go back to the larger issue which is I hope we turn down this legislation overall.
To me all of the issues we are talking about, whether it is about safe drinking water, whether it is about oilspills and the requirements on these companies or if it is about whether TransCanada can take U.S. property under eminent domain or whether it is about the route itself, all of these questions in my mind are premature for us, the Congress, to decide.
Over 60 percent of the American people say they want this pipeline decided in a normal process. They want the State Department, in this instance because it crosses a border, to be the entity that determines national interest. So I do not want to predetermine that when there are so many important issues to be negotiated. The very company that wanted to negotiate with the State Department on this pipeline was negotiating some of the original routing. Yet at the very time the State Department was telling them the original routing would not work, they were here trying to persuade Members to vote for the authority to override the President and to give that routing, which we now know was flawed.
I do not want to be premature about this. I do not want to be premature about cutting off debate. I want to get to these amendments before us and get the bill done with the input of my colleagues, given that the debate was brought up to the floor.
If you ask me what I want to debate, I would be debating some other legislation because I do not think this bill is going to be signed by the President of the United States.
I would be debating energy tax policy on clean energy items. I would be debating other things that I think would be impacting more our energy strategy for the future, our economy, and job creation. I think there are a lot of those out there. I hope my colleague from Alaska and I, once this debate is over with, will be able to sit down and talk about these issues, in a bipartisan fashion, and work with the committee.
In 2007, we passed the Energy Independence and Security Act out of the energy committee on a bipartisan basis. It was landmark legislation that unleashed a lot of investment. It unleashed investment in making sure we had higher fuel efficiency cars in our country, which was good for the consumer because they got a car that got more mileage. It made investments in things such as the smart grid and other energy infrastructure.
I hope that is what we will get back to, because when I look at what is happening--I know my colleague from Alaska just talked about some of these issues as it related to Alaska. I know she means what she says when she says she is speaking from the heart and working hard for Alaskans. I visited Alaska with her and my colleague, then-Senator-from-Alaska Mark Begich. I visited many parts of Alaska.
I understand. Alaskans want to have an economic opportunity. They want their energy to be cheaper. I would say I am empathetic to the issue because we have five refineries in the State of Washington. We are the fifth largest refining State in the Nation. A lot of our oil comes from Alaska. So I can tell you that people in the Northwest are furious that even though we have those refineries--so a lot of refining capacity and the oil comes from Alaska--we still have some of the highest gas prices in the Nation. Many times we have asked for various investigations about why we have the highest gas prices in the Nation and why this issue continues to plague us.
I know my colleague, when she speaks about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or ideas about more drilling, that it is about getting more oil supply. But more oil supply from Alaska has not helped Washington consumers have cheaper gasoline prices.
So I want to continue to diversify our economy off of fossil fuels and onto other things. I hope we will get a chance to work on an energy bill that does that. If I could just address for a couple of minutes the issue of the President's decision to move forward on a plan that would help preserve the Arctic wildlife refuge as wilderness. My colleague from Alaska mentioned this issue is something that has been going on for some time. She is right.
The predecessors that she and I--the former chair of the energy committee, Scoop Jackson, and the former late Senator Ted Stevens--everybody has been a part of this. I actually was here at a pretty dramatic floor debate on this issue in 2005, in which some people wanted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, even to the degree that they put that as a rider on the Defense bill. We were able to stop that. I think that was the will of Congress, that they did not want to see drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
But we have had this discussion since 1960, when Dwight Eisenhower set aside originally 9 million acres, and in 1980, thanks to the work of Scoop Jackson, Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which expanded the refuge to 19 million acres.
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