[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 150 (Monday, September 22, 2008)]
[House]
[Page H8550]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, a number of the speakers tonight 
have been talking about the bailout on Wall Street. And we've been told 
by the head of the Treasury and the FDIC that, unless we do this, there 
could be real dire consequences for the entire economy of the United 
States.
  The amount that we've been talking about, which will be brought to 
the floor, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion, which is 
directly going to go to our national debt, in all probability. 
Hopefully, some of those assets that are going to be bought will be 
able to be sold down the road and the money repaid to the Treasury.
  But the thing that bothers me the most is we haven't done anything 
that will really create new jobs. The speaker that just spoke talked 
about the creation of new jobs. And we passed an energy bill last week 
that really isn't going to do anything. And we have the ability to 
drill off the Continental Shelf and Alaska and elsewhere. And we can 
get billions and billions of dollars in money coming into the United 
States Treasury from these assets that we have already, and that is, 
oil, gas, shale, and other commodities that will help us with our 
energy crisis.
  We have an energy crisis right now, and we have not passed an energy 
bill that will do anything. Boone Pickens has been on television 
talking about the transfer of wealth, $700 billion a year. It's an odd 
consequence that we're going to be asking for $700 billion for the 
``Wall Street bailout'' and at the same time we're denying the drilling 
for oil and other energy products here in the United States which could 
save $700 billion of our money that's going overseas to Saudi Arabia, 
to Nigeria, down south to Venezuela. And so the United States is 
actually turning over our money that we could keep here at home and 
create hundreds and thousands of jobs and really help this economy if 
we could just go after the energy sources that we already have here in 
the United States.
  I just don't understand it. We're sending $700 billion to Saudi 
Arabia, and they're going to be buying these assets here in the United 
States. It's going to be our money that's purchasing the oil that gives 
them the money to buy the products here in the United States. It makes 
no sense, especially when we have the energy products right here in 
this country, offshore and up in ANWR, and elsewhere, trillions of 
square feet of gas, millions of barrels of oil, and we can't drill for 
them because of the environmental concerns that people are talking 
about. And we could do it in an environmentally safe way.
  It makes no sense to me whatsoever to send $700 billion out of this 
country that we can keep here at home creating jobs. And at the same 
time that we're sending that $700 billion out of this country to buy 
oil from other parts of the world, we're asked to give $700 billion to 
bail out bad investments that have been made, bad loans that have been 
made. It just doesn't make sense to me.
  If we're really concerned about the economy of the United States, we 
need to drill here, we need to drill now. Use alternative sources of 
energy as well--wind and solar and everything else--but we need to 
drill here in the United States. The American people are suffering. 
They're still playing $4 plus for a gallon of gas, $80 to fill up a 20-
gallon tank on a car or a truck. The American people can't afford it. 
And we could be saving that money, reducing the price of oil and 
gasoline dramatically, if we drilled here and drilled now, keeping $700 
billion of our money here instead of sending it overseas, and 
especially at a time when we're going to be bailing out financial 
institutions to the tune of $700 billion.
  It's really odd. We're sending $700 billion of our money overseas--we 
don't need to--at a time when we could sure use it here at home to deal 
with our financial crisis.
  We need to drill here, we need to drill now. We need to lower the 
price of gasoline and oil and other energy products and we're not doing 
it. And I simply don't understand it, Mr. Speaker.
  And I want to say it one more time; the energy bill we passed last 
week isn't going to doing anything. It's not going to provide one 
barrel of new oil from the United States. And we're going to continue 
to send to Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and elsewhere, $700 
billion of America's money, which could be used to create hundreds of 
thousands of jobs. It makes no sense. We should drill here, we should 
drill now. We should move toward energy independence and immediately 
start lowering the price of gasoline and other fuel products.

                          ____________________