[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6128]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               GAS CRISIS

  (Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, if you liked the administration and the 
Republican Congress' response to Hurricane Katrina, you are going to 
love the response to this gas crisis. Because while folks said they 
could not anticipate that the levees would be topped, when you do what 
the administration has done, you should have been anticipating $3 plus, 
$3.25, and $3.35 gasoline at the pump.
  When you go into secret energy meetings, as the Vice President did, 
to devise an energy strategy and come out with a giveaway to the energy 
industry; when you have a President who refuses to act when Enron was 
stealing billions of dollars from the economy, telling the oil industry 
you can go ahead and do the same thing because I will not act; when 
three times Democrats stood proudly to have a bill to allow the FTC to 
investigate this price gouging and the Republicans voted in lockstep 
against it, you could anticipate the levees would be topped, and you 
could anticipate that the oil companies would run rampant with the 
price of gasoline.
  Now, how has this President responded? He wants to do this thing with 
a slow one-half of one-third of 1 percent increase in production to do 
something about it. If your house is on fire, the President would bring 
you a thimbleful of water, and that is the only assistance we are 
getting. We need real action, not these baby steps.

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