[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 12 (Monday, January 22, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H832-H833]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  TAKING CREDIT FOR RISING GAS PRICES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Walz of Minnesota). Under a previous 
order of the House, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is 
recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, friends from this side of the aisle have 
been talking tonight about the tax increase we had last week.
  One of the things that I have observed in my 2 years that I have been 
here is sometimes people take credit for things that maybe they had an 
effect on, and maybe they didn't. But over the last couple of years, 
one of the things we have been doing is we have tried to provide for 
drilling for gas.
  There are trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in the Gulf Coast. 
It is a fact, we have trillions of cubic feet of gas. You can go along 
the Outer Continental Shelf along both coasts, and many States do not 
want any drilling out there. They want all the energy, they want it 
cheap. They don't want any of it drilled where they may have to look at 
it, but they want the energy. People fight that. They don't want any 
drilling out there.
  Then we have this area that is tundra, as we were taught growing up 
in public school, tundra, where there is just not much of anything. Yet 
people don't want to allow drilling in that area, even though it could 
provide 1\1/2\ million barrels of oil a day.
  The OCS and ANWR, those are not be-all-end-all solutions to our 
energy needs, but they are a small part of the solution. Alternative 
fuels, bioethanol. We have biomass in East Texas, where I am from, and 
we have oil and gas as well. We have coal. We have all these things. 
There are projects to produce energy with zero emissions from coal. All 
of these great things are going on that we are trying to push, and so 
much of it met with opposition.
  Then we came along last week, and we end up having the incentives to 
do domestic drilling in the United States or off our coasts to provide 
additional energy and to do it with domestic people, domestic 
companies, domestic jobs to help the economy, as well as provide fuel 
that we don't have go overseas to get, and yet those incentives, it was 
voted by the majority as pushed by our Democrat friends across the 
aisle to remove those incentives.
  The thing that struck me over the last couple of years as we fought 
against Democrats who didn't want to drill the Outer Continental Shelf, 
didn't want to drill ANWR, they fought like crazy against having 
incentives for new refineries. We are realistic enough. We know that 
the big oil companies are not going to build more refineries here. They 
do it in other places where it is cheaper. But it was to encourage 
independent oil companies to drill here in America, and also to refine 
here in America, because we need the gasoline to keep things going 
until we get sufficient alternative fuels.
  But after fighting against us to allow those things to bring down the 
prices of gasoline, as gasoline skyrocketed, I was amazed. People on 
the other side of the aisle blamed Republicans for the skyrocketing gas 
prices.
  The thing that struck me, and I just wanted to leave my friends in 
the House with this thought, if you are going to fight against the 
things that make for cheaper fuel, then when the price of gasoline 
skyrockets, at least have the decency to take credit for it. ``Yes, we 
got the high gas prices. America, you ought to love us. We drove up the 
price of gasoline, and now it is way up and you ought to love us for 
it.'' Instead, we got blamed because gasoline got high.
  So I hope as a result of what we saw what happen last week, as it 
ends up in the next year or so causing a spike in the price of 
gasoline, that our friends across the aisle that caused this spike that 
they have put in the pipeline now to generate a skyrocketing gasoline 
price, that when that occurs, they will go ahead and stand up and say, 
``You bet gasoline is high; and we Democrats, we proudly caused it.''

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