[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 57 (Thursday, April 29, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Page S4635]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 ENERGY

  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I must tell my colleagues that, as 
chairman of the Energy Committee, I am having a good week for a change. 
On Monday, Senator Cantwell came to the floor and sought unanimous 
consent to bring up one piece of the Energy bill. On Tuesday, the 
minority leader came to the floor and offered a portion of the Energy 
bill as an amendment to the Internet tax bill.
  We seem to be on a roll. Members know this country has a serious 
energy problem. They are feeling the political pressure to do something 
about it. That is good news for this chairman, who has waited so long 
and worked so hard seeking to develop some sort of political consensus 
on a broad energy bill.
  Fellow Senators, I have never in my 31 years worked on legislation 
that is so hard to piece together, because every time you have a 
comprehensive bill, you show it to somebody and they read it in its 
entirety, they find one piece out of hundreds they cannot support. If I 
had the wisdom and the time to go to every Senator and let them read it 
and say what can I take out that would make you happy and have you go 
for this bill, I assume that when I was finished, this 900-page 
authorizing bill would probably end up being just a few sheets of 
paper.
  The truth is that America is crying for a comprehensive energy bill. 
America is not worried about one Senator's particular concern about one 
particular aspect. They are worried about the fact we will soon be 
importing natural gas. We have been using our own natural gas, and now 
predictions are that we are going to be using foreign natural gas in 
large quantities very soon.
  The consensus that I indicated to you is very hard to achieve. In the 
last Congress, the House and Senate both passed bills but were unable 
to resolve their differences in conference. I am not speaking of a few 
months ago; I mean the last legislative session, the last Congress.
  Last year the Senate considered energy legislation for somewhere on 
the order of 3 months before we were able to pass a bill off the floor. 
This time we got a conference agreement.
  I have been criticized for that conference. Some say we didn't have 
enough meetings. Some say the meetings were not open to the public. 
Others say they were not open to the Democratic staff.
  Let me tell you, this is good rhetoric, but the truth is we conducted 
one of the most open conferences that I have been in in almost 32 years 
in the Senate. We made agreements public as they were reached and at 
the end, before we circulated the agreement for signature, we held an 
open meeting and reconsidered all the amendments. When amendments could 
be agreed to by both bodies, we made changes. That is very different 
than the way most conferences are conducted. I have asked Senators on 
both sides of the aisle if they have been involved in bills where they 
were the minority and they didn't even participate in the conference, 
and many have said that is almost the course of things as we live in 
this Senate. Yet we did our best to use the Internet as a new tool. We 
submitted this to all the press through the Internet. They knew more 
about this bill if they wanted to report it than anybody has ever 
known. While doing that, we obviously submitted it to the minority and 
the minority staff.

  I responded to that criticism by dramatically reducing this bill. It 
is a slimmed-down energy bill. It dramatically reduces the cost for the 
nontax portions. We have reduced the cost from $5.4 billion to a minus 
$1.3 billion.

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