[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 102 (Thursday, June 19, 2008)]
[House]
[Page H5710]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   PETITION TO LOWER GASOLINE PRICES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Westmoreland) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WESTMORELAND. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be 
here tonight to address you and the other Members of this body. And I 
wanted to bring to the attention, Mr. Speaker, the fact that I guess 
several weeks ago we had calls from constituents and seeing 
constituents at town hall meetings and other places. They had asked me 
if I had been on-line or on the Internet to sign some of the petitions 
that different people had up to bring down the price of gas. They were 
tired of going to the pump and paying $4 a gallon for the gas.
  They had heard the promises from the Majority of the 110th Congress 
made back when they were running for office, that they had a 
commonsense plan to bring down the cost of skyrocketing gas which, at 
the time, was about $2.20. It's now about $4.08. So they were mystified 
as much as I was about what this secret plan was. And so they were 
going on-line and signing these Internet petitions asking us or letting 
us know, Members of this body, that they were demanding that gas prices 
come down, and by doing that, to drill here and to drill now.
  One of those Internet sites, and there's many, but one is American 
Solutions. And I understand today, from reading an article, that over a 
million Americans have gone to that site and said, you know what? Let's 
drill here, let's drill now, and let's lower gas prices.
  And so I was thinking to myself because I had gone into a service 
station to fill up with the $4 a gallon gas in my pickup truck, and 
there was a petition laying on the counter that said, you know, we want 
our gas prices brought down. Sign this petition.
  And I thought, you know, not only is this an Internet, but people 
that are working at these service stations and I'm sure other places 
are having these petitions saying, you know, we need our energy costs 
brought down.
  And Mr. Speaker, I said, you know, the American people need to know 
how their Members of Congress feel. We're hearing from them on all of 
these different petitions how they feel. They need to know how their 
representative feels.
  So I came up with a petition. And basically, this petition says, 
American energy solutions for lower gas prices. And it brings onshore 
oil on-line. It brings deep water oil on-line. And it brings new 
refineries on-line. And that's pretty simple. That's about as simple as 
you can get in this body.
  Everything we vote on here is so convoluted that many of the Members 
don't understand what they're voting on, Mr. Speaker. And a majority of 
the American people do not know. Some of these bills are three and four 
and 500 pages. And it's hard to consume all that information and 
understand what is going on. So a lot of Members can have an excuse to 
vote for or against it because, as Mr. Obey said today on the floor, 
they make these bills to get 218 votes. So they take these bills and 
put as many sweeteners in it as they need to to get to 218. So many 
Members can say, well, it was a bad piece of legislation, but because 
they put X, Y, or Z in it, I voted for it.
  I wanted to keep this petition as simple as possible. And so 
basically, what the petition says, I will vote to increase U.S. oil 
production, to lower gas prices for Americans. How much simpler can you 
get?
  Mr. Speaker, you can't imagine some of the answers from the Members 
of this body for not wanting to sign this. They're unbelievable. I 
don't know how they're going to explain it to their constituents, but 
their constituents have an opportunity to see, and we update this, Mr. 
Speaker, on our Web site, which is house.gov/westmoreland, W-E-S-T-M-O-
R-E-L-A-N-D. We update it after every series of votes, so it will be 
updated probably in about 30 or 45 minutes. It will be updated and you 
can go to that Web site. And we had 32,000 hits on that Web site last 
night, for people wanting to go and see how their congressman felt 
about it.
  Now, we've had about 160 Congressmen that have signed this so far, so 
we're probably about 58 short of getting to 218, which is what you need 
to pass this.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I would encourage all Americans to go to that and to 
find out how the Members of this House feel about lowering gas prices 
in this country.

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