[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Page 10198]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             URGENT CRISES

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, our Nation faces many urgent crises at 
the moment. Americans are looking for solutions. They are not getting 
any from Washington. Whether it is the housing crisis or the financial 
crisis, the debt crisis or the crisis in the gulf, what they are 
getting is a White House and a Democratic majority in Congress that 
seems more intent on pursuing a government-driven political agenda than 
finding commonsense solutions to the problems about which all of us are 
concerned.
  Americans are exasperated by all this, but they should not be 
surprised because if there is one motto that defines this 
administration, it is the one delivered by the White House Chief of 
Staff in a revealing moment just after the President's election. I am 
referring, of course, to what Rahm Emanuel famously referred to as 
``Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste.'' It is a fitting slogan 
for an administration which saw a crisis at some of America's great 
automaking firms as an opportunity for the government to extend its 
reach into industrial policy, which saw the panic on Wall Street as an 
opportunity for government to extend its reach further into Main 
Street, which saw out-of-control costs in health care as an opportunity 
to extend government's reach further into health care decisions of 
every American, and which is now talking about using a nightmarish 
environmental calamity in the gulf as a prime opportunity to extend 
government's reach even further into Americans' lives through a new, 
job-killing national energy tax that would hit every single household 
and business, small or large, in our country.
  Think about it. For more than 50 straight days, an underwater geyser 
of oil, now roughly the size of Vermont, has been polluting the gulf. 
This is the kind of crisis that in the past would have united the 
Nation in a focused effort to solve the problem. Yet day after day, as 
this toxic oil continues to flow, what we get from the administration 
is some new twist on the blame game or some ham-handed effort to appear 
in control of the situation.
  Meanwhile, in Congress, we are getting much the same thing. The 
deficit extenders bill that is now on the floor was supposed to be 
about giving job creators some assurance that the tax benefits they 
currently are receiving and on which they depend to retain workers will 
be there the next time they have to make a major business-related 
decision. Yet Democrats are using this bill as another opportunity to 
extend government's reach. Desperate for funds to bail out programs, 
they are raiding a trust fund--get this--created to pay for just the 
kind of cleanup we now need in the gulf. They are quintupling the tax 
that oil companies pay into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund that was 
created in the wake of the Exxon Valdez fix, and instead of using this 
money to clean up the oil that is spewing in the gulf, they are raiding 
the trust fund to pay for new unrelated spending.
  Dipping into the oilspill trust fund in order to pay for something 
else--in other words, they are using the crisis in the gulf not only as 
a cover for even more government spending but as a major source of 
funding for it. This is really an outrage, and it should give every 
American a window into the Democratic approach to spending, as well as 
the lack of seriousness about the debt. Frankly, they just cannot 
restrain themselves. That is the only possible excuse for raiding this 
trust fund for unrelated government spending.
  At the same time, as Americans wonder when this gusher will ever be 
plugged, we hear word that the administration and my good friend, the 
majority leader, want to piggyback their controversial new national 
energy tax--also known as cap and trade--to an oilspill response bill 
that could and should be an opportunity for true bipartisan 
cooperation. So again we see the administration using a crisis--in this 
case the disaster in the gulf--as an opportunity to muscle through 
Congress another deeply unpopular bill that has profound implications 
for small businesses and struggling households.
  Look, if the health care debate taught us anything--anything at all--
it is that Americans want these kinds of massive bills to be debated 
out in the open, not rushed past them on a holiday or tucked into a 
must-pass bill aimed at alleviating the kind of suffering we are seeing 
in the gulf. The problem for Democrats is that debating the Democratic 
cap-and-trade bill might not fit neatly into the White House messaging 
plan since it has been widely reported that a major part--a major 
part--of the Kerry-Lieberman bill was essentially written by BP.
  Let me say that again: A major part of the Kerry-Lieberman bill was 
written by BP. This is clearly an inconvenient fact. An administration 
that seems to spend most of its time coming up with ways to show how 
angry it is with BP is pushing a proposal that BP actually helped to 
write. I can't understand, and I don't think the American people will 
understand, why the majority believes it makes sense to respond to the 
BP oilspill by imposing a gas tax increase on the American people that 
was advocated by BP.
  I think the American people want us to work together to address the 
disaster in the gulf, not exploit it--not exploit it--for partisan 
political purposes. The oilspill trust fund ought to be used to clean 
up oilspills. The oilspill trust fund ought to be used to clean up 
oilspills. This is one crisis Americans will not let Democrats exploit 
for their policy purposes.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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