WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, made the following statement Wednesday night during a Rules Committee hearing on Speaker Pelosi’s energy bill:
“Madame Chair, as Yogi Berra once said ‘this is déjà vu all over again.’ The process for consideration of energy legislation in this Congress has been deeply flawed from the very beginning of the year; the result of this process is a deeply flawed bill that I cannot support and has no chance of becoming law.
“H.R. 6, as originally passed the House was written, as far as I am aware, without the input of the committee primarily responsible for energy policy – the Energy and Commerce Committee. In what has become the norm, this bill proceeded to the floor with almost no legislative process – no hearings, no committee markups, no committee reports, and no floor amendments.
“Well Madame Chair, here we go again. We are now confronted with an amendment to the Senate-passed version of H.R. 6, which is the product of a legislative process that can only be described as no process at all. Instead of convening a formal conference to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions of H.R. 6, the amendment before us today was crafted by the House majority leadership, largely without consulting the minority or, frankly, the majority members of the Energy and Commerce Committee. The result is an amendment containing numerous provisions that I and most of my colleagues cannot support and, if it passes the House and Senate, the president will surely veto. This is not the way to write good energy policy.
“Madame Chair, I know something about how to produce a bipartisan piece of energy legislation. When I chaired the conference committee that produced the Energy Policy Act of 2005, I made it a priority to include the minority at every stage of the process and on every issue. The involvement of members like Mr. Dingell made the bill better and together we produced a balanced piece of energy legislation that created the Renewable Fuel Standard, safeguarded our nation’s electricity grid, increased energy efficiency requirements and encouraged domestic energy production. The bill that became law, and the reason it did become law, was the consequence of the close cooperation between the minority and majority of both Houses of Congress.
“Unfortunately, this type of process hasn’t been followed – in fact almost no discernable process has been. As a result, if this bill were to become law, the price of gasoline will go up instead of down. The cost of heating your home or cooking with electricity will go up instead of down, especially in regions that today enjoy low-cost power. And the cost of driving to work or school will go up instead of down because the stringent new fuel standards cannot be met with most of today’s fleet. In short Madame Chair, the Democratic majority’s remarkably undemocratic process has produced a bill that harms more than it helps and has no chance of being signed into law.
“Madame Chair, I urge you to introduce some openness and fairness into this process, even at this late hour. Allow all amendments requested by members so the House can at least consider issues like CAFE reform and a new renewable fuel mandate in an up-or-down fashion. If you can’t do all that, do not grant a rule at all and let this pitiful product go away. I am sure the American people will thank you in the end.”
