posted July 23, 2008
U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tn.) made the following remarks on the floor of the Senate on Wednesday, regarding finding a solution for $4 gas prices:
“The Democratic leadership in the Senate is approaching the crisis of $4 per gallon gasoline with all the urgency of naming a post office...I’ve just come back from four days in Tennessee. I believe if I walked down the street in any one of our towns and talked to 100 people and asked, ‘What do you think we ought to do in the United States Senate?’ I would get the same answer: ‘We would like you to do something serious about $4 per gallon gasoline prices and we would like you to work across party lines to get it done.’”
“We can deal with speculation. We have proposed doing that. Claiming that a bill solely focused on speculation will deal with $4 gasoline is the equivalent of passing legislation on being thirsty without dealing with water. We need to work on supply and demand.”
“Republicans understand we have to reduce demand as well as increase supply, but the other side is stuck on using only half of the law of supply and demand because they have forgotten Economics 101. We say, ‘offshore drilling.’ They say, ‘no, we can’t.’ We say, ‘more oil shale.’ They say, ‘no, we can’t.’ We say, ‘five or six more nuclear plants each year to have clean electricity for plug-in cars and trucks,’ and they say, ‘no, we can’t.’”
“What’s breaking the family budget today is energy prices: $4 gasoline is driving up the price of fuel for cars and trucks, is driving up the cost of food because, as we know, energy is such an important part of agriculture. People are hurting...What is the Senate doing? We are talking.”
“If we were to take action today on supply and demand, the price of gasoline today would stabilize and go down.”
“We need to do everything we can in the next week or so to fashion a bill that takes a substantial step toward increasing the supply and reducing the demand for oil. Not say, ‘no we can’t, no we can’t, no we can’t.’ We can say ‘yes, we can’ to finding more and using less, and the American people expect us to do that.”
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