Ratepayer Protection Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCALISE. I want to thank my friend from Kentucky, the chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee, for yielding and for bringing forward the Ratepayer Protection Act.

Mr. Chairman, this bill goes directly to the heart of these radical regulations, which are coming out of agencies like the EPA, that are killing jobs in America. When you look at this regulation, this proposal by the EPA that this bill addresses, the EPA is proposing to bring forward more radical regulations that are going to increase the cost of household electricity for every family in this country. The estimates show you will see an over 12 percent increase in household electricity rates if the EPA is allowed to move forward.

When you look at what this legislation does, at least it stands up and protects hard-working taxpayers who are tired of all of these regulations--one after the other--coming forward, not through legislation passed by Congress--in open, public settings like this that you can watch on C-SPAN--but coming forward through unelected bureaucrats at the EPA who want to carry out their own agenda.

They can't pass it through Congress, so they try to just ram it through in regulations that aren't backed up by science but that would, in fact, actually, lead to more jobs being shipped out of this country.

Where would those jobs go, Mr. Chairman? They would go to places like China and India and Brazil and to other countries that don't have the environmental standards that we have. You will actually see more carbon emitted if the EPA is successful in moving forward with regulations like this that this bill is addressing.

I want to commend the chairman for bringing this forward. I think you are going to see a large, bipartisan vote in support of this legislation because people across the country are saying enough is enough.

If the proposal is so good by the EPA, why not move it through Congress? Why not have public hearings on C-SPAN and present the facts and point out and defend the increases that families are going to have in their household electricity rates?

They want to hide, Mr. Chairman. They want to hide and try to just sneak this through with the regulation and not have any public vote on the bill.

Here you have a bill, a bill that says let's slow this process down, that says let's actually give States the ability to opt out if they realize just how devastating it will be not only to the states' economies, but to the taxpayers in each State.

In my State of Louisiana, this proposal by the EPA that we are trying to stop would yield about a 13 percent increase in people's household electricity rates. We are already paying too much. The costs of things are already too high because of regulations coming out of Washington not imposed by Congress, but imposed by unelected bureaucrats.

Enough is enough. Let's rein in these unelected bureaucrats, and let's bring some common sense back to the process of getting our economy back on track. I urge the approval of this legislation, which is so important to getting our economy moving again.

Source