[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 10043]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                TAPPING THE STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE

  (Mr. SCALISE asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the President made a decision to 
raid 30 million barrels out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Now, of 
course one thing the President did yesterday in that decision was he 
acknowledged that supply has an impact on price, which is a reversal of 
his previous statement.
  The problem is rather than actually opening up known reserves of 
American oil where we can go and create tens of thousands of American 
jobs and get rid of some of this dependency on some of these Middle 
Eastern countries, what the President said instead was he's just going 
to go and raid America's, in essence, our safety net.
  This Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there for national emergencies. 
It's not there just because maybe the President feels it would be 
politically popular for a couple of days to do something. This doesn't 
even get us past 2 days' worth of America's supply.
  We have known reserves that this President is shutting off all across 
this country. And we can actually reduce our dependence on Middle 
Eastern oil if we go out and create those jobs, create that American 
energy, rather than raiding our savings account for oil.
  And so the President's decision was a failed policy that doubles down 
on his previous failed policy on energy that has gotten us to 
skyrocketing gas prices. And of course we're going to be back here 
again in just a couple of days when this short-term fix runs out.
  Instead, we should put a real energy policy in place that reduces our 
dependence on foreign oil.

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