The Standing Rules of the Senate are drafted to encourage vigorous public debate on our nation’s most important issues. Indeed, the U.S. Senate is often referred to as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” The Rules allow any Senator to seek recognition from the Chair at any time and, absent a temporary agreement to the contrary, to speak without interruption so long as he or she wishes. Debating important questions before the Senate is one way a Senator can highlight an issue, advocate for a change in policy, or voice his or her opinion on pending legislation.
Senate debate occurs in public, and is televised on CSPAN and transcribed in the Congressional Record. For your convenience, I post transcripts of my Senate floor speeches on this site for your review. I hope you find them informative and useful. My web site also makes available information on my voting record and legislation that I have sponsored in the Senate.
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Sessions Speaks on Climate Security
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, what is the time agreement at this stage?
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator is allocated 10 minutes.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, our Nation wants progress toward energy security, affordable energy. It wants to reduce pollution and it wants to fight global warming. There is no doubt about that. It wants us, this Congress, to do something. But it wants us to do the right things, wise things, prudent things, not wrong things.
I traveled my State this past week, all week, from every corner of it. My wife and I traveled around and we talked to a lot of people. One thing that is absolutely clear to anybody who has eyes to see and ears to hear is that the American people are terribly concerned about surging gasoline and electricity prices that are rising, and this is hurting them. This is not an academic matter we are talking about. Average families, carpooling and driving to work, are going to the gas pump and finding that when the month is over, their bill is now $50, $75, or $100 more for the same amount of gasoline that they bought 2 or 3 years ago, and it impacts their budget. They have less money to pay other bills with, to fix the brakes on the car, or purchase a set of tires, or take a trip, or have a medical expense, or buy a new suit of clothes. These things are reduced when we have now added to their normal expenses $50, $75, or $100 a month for fuel.
Some of that, I believe, we can do something about; some of that we may not. We have to be honest with our constituents. But they want us to do something. They are not happy, and they should not be, that we are importing 60 percent of the gasoline and oil that we will need to run our country from foreign countries, many of which are hostile to us. We are transferring out of our country $500 billion to purchase that oil. It is the greatest wealth transfer in the history of the world. No one has ever seen anything like it before, and it is, in my opinion, without any doubt a factor--a major factor; perhaps the major factor--in the economic slowdown we are seeing today and making us less competitive, and it is reducing and threatening the health of our economy.
Now, when you talk to people in my State, and I think any State that you would consider, and you tell them: Well, we are going to be talking about energy matters next week, and we have a cap-and-trade bill that is on the Senate floor, our good and decent and trustworthy citizens, the ones who still have a modicum of confidence in Congress, you know what they think? You know what they think? They think we are going to set about in Congress to do something about surging energy prices, to contain the increase in gasoline prices, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and this incredible wealth transfer leaving our Nation's security at risk. They think we are going to take steps to strengthen the American economy.
Why shouldn't they? Isn't that what they pay us to do? But, oh, no, they would be shocked to learn that the Democratic leadership, the leadership of that great Democratic party which claims to represent middle-class Americans, is uninterested in these matters but is now attempting to pass legislation that will raise taxes, substantially raise energy costs, gasoline prices, by 50 cents plus a gallon, will cause worker layoffs, and will hurt our economy and leave us less competitive in the world marketplace. That is what this bill will do. It is the opposite of what the American people, our dutiful citizens who send us here, would expect us to be doing at this time.
On Monday, my good friend, Senator Reid, the Democratic leader--and I do admire him, and he has a tough job, there is no doubt about it. I know he can't make everybody happy--seemed hurt Monday that the Republican Leader MITCH MCCONNELL said bringing this bill up demonstrated he was out of touch. Well, I say that is maybe too nice a term. Maybe ``clueless'' would have been a legitimate term. Senator Reid is such a wonderful guy. He comes from Searchlight, NV. I suggest he go back to Searchlight and talk to real people. What are they going to say, that they want us to raise prices of gasoline? Give me a break. They are not going to tell him that in Searchlight, just as they didn't tell me in Alabama to come here and pass higher taxes on gasoline, to create bureaucracies the likes of which we have never seen, to create high energy prices, to drive up the price of energy by this complex, sneaky cap-and-trade tax system that the Wall Street Journal calls the greatest wealth transfer since the income tax, or to create a bureaucracy that is going to monitor this complexity throughout the country.
It is an unbelievable 342 pages, this bill that is now before us, and it is not the right thing. It would represent an injection of Washington into the most marvelous thing we have, in many ways, in our country--the free American economy. It would be an injection of Washington into that economy of unprecedented proportions.
The goal of this legislation is to reduce CO 2 emissions in our country, they say, by 71 percent by 2050. That means to reduce the amount of carbon fuels we use by 71 percent by 2050. But the population is increasing in our country during this time significantly, by every poll that I think is accurate, and when you calculate that, it means we are going to reduce carbon emissions per American--per capita--by 90 percent. It means virtually the elimination of coal, natural gas, and gasoline and oil--eliminate those from the American economy. We do not have the science and the technology to get us there as of now, yet this bill would put us on a direct glidepath toward that direction.
So the fact that this is a tax, that it would drive up energy costs--indeed is a sneaky tax on the American people--is indisputable. Nobody disputes that. To borrow a phrase from former Vice President Gore, the debate is over on that question. This bill will increase the cost of energy, and high energy prices will reduce economic output, reduce our purchasing power, lower the demand for goods and services, make us less competitive in the world, and ultimately cost American jobs. That is a fact. Supporters will argue that it creates a fund to alleviate high energy costs for low-income Americans by reallocating some of the trillions of dollars to people, according to the political whims of, I guess, this Congress, to decide who will win and who will get money back and who won't get money back. The current increase in gasoline prices alone amounts to about 50 cents a gallon, as I indicated, under this legislation. And, amazingly, it does nothing, zero, to produce any more clean American energy and to lower the price of gasoline to produce our energy here at home. I worry about that.
In the years to come, we are going to be using a lot of oil and gas and coal. We could use clean coal to create liquid fuels that we could burn in our automobiles. All of that absolutely can be done to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Let me tell you, there is a big difference economically, if you take a moment to think about it, in sending $500 billion to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and UAE to buy oil with than if we spent that money at home creating American jobs for American workers.
I tell my colleagues that this is a bill that is unjustified and unwise. It is change, but change in the wrong direction, and I urge its defeat.
I yield the floor.
