I really believe that Speaker Pelosi is more concerned with saving the planet than with saving jobs and the economy. She is an avowed opponent of fossil fuels and whether that is crude oil, natural gas, coal - to get her to change her mind in favor of increasing supply, I actually believe is not doable. She will block it.

If she brings legislation on the floor under her conditions only, it’s a Pelosi bill, not one representative of the rest of us. When we passed the 2005 energy bill, it came through 5 committees, with amendments. I believe a new energy bill that allowed drilling would have a majority vote if it would be allowed today.

In terms of talking to the Democrats, I’ve been a member 12 years, we all have friends who are Democrats. We all know fossil fuel Democrats. They need to step up and vote for more supply. And now that she’s finally beginning to budge a little - why do you think she’s suddenly changing her position? It’s because the public has turned and now members of the House are being held more accountable.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, that’s an old Chinese proverb. Former President Clinton vetoed this in 1995, and if he hadn’t done that, we’d have a million barrels of oil today - 3 years ago in fact. If you’re going to argue that speculation has driven the price up, you’d have to believe that if a major announcement was made for more supply that the prices would drop at the pump. You can’t have it both ways. What I’m saying is we need to create a new energy policy that combines all of the above. the only reason the Democrats have a fixation with doing nothing is because they don’t like fossil fuels.

I think that if new technology is put properly in place we’ll be much better off. Eventually if you move in that direction you can go from pulverized coal fire plants to gassification. All I know is that right now, the democrats are walking away from the lower middle class and rural America. Just last week when I was here in Washington I read a letter from a union guy who said he was voting republican for the first time because of this issue - he had been a lifelong democrat. If you walk away from the middle and lower middle class, that’s not a good thing. Whether or not the House Democrats will defy Pelosi depends on how gutsy they are. They keep promising they’ll make a stand - this should be their stand. In the mean time, this is a good debate and we know that we’re on the right side of this issue today.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Politics .