Transcript of Pelosi, House Democrats' Press Conference Today

Washington, D.C. - Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Congressman Edward Markey, Ranking Member on the Natural Resources Committee, and Congressman Tim Bishop, Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Water Resources and the Environment, held a press conference today in the Capitol to highlight Democratic efforts to end tax breaks for Big Oil despite Republican opposition.  Below is a transcript of the press conference.   

Leader Pelosi.  Good morning.  Busy morning, huh?

Here we are over 120 days of the Republican majority in the Congress and we still have not seen any jobs bill come to the floor, nor even any proposals of some to do so.  We see a budget that continues to give subsidies to Big Oil while it calls upon America's seniors to pay more for Medicare and receive less in terms of benefits.

In terms of Big Oil, the President has written to the leaders in the Congress asking for us to bring legislation to the floor to end those subsidies.  I have written to the Speaker in light of his remarks, Big Oil should pay its fair share, and the statement of the response of Chairman Ryan in his district that he would be well disposed to such an idea, to ask the Speaker to bring a bill to the floor to end the subsidies to Big Oil.

Just put it in this perspective:  if we were to end a big part of those subsidies, we could save $31 billion over 10 years.  The Republicans say that Big Oil needs these subsidies as an incentive to drill.  And yet for the first quarter of this year big five oil companies had profits of over $30 billion.  In one quarter.  Why is the taxpayer having to pay?  Why are seniors being asked to pay more so that we can subsidize Big Oil when they are making, again, record profits?

And so we are going to talk about--next week we will have a bigger rollout regarding domestic production and renewable energy and clean alternatives and renewable energy alternatives to reduce our dependence on oil, foreign and domestic.  But also we'll talk about increased domestic production, which we have always been for.  It's just that it's not the only answer.  So when the Republicans say that they want to do it all, when in fact in their budget they cut incentives for green technologies, they cut funding for research for just those things.  So that isn't really a fact.

I think we can find some common ground on this as long as we have the consumer and the taxpayers' interest at heart.  And that's why we will be putting forth legislation to end tax breaks for the biggest oil companies, making sure that these companies pay the royalty that is due the American people and taxpayer.  We will combat price gouging by the industry, raising the price at the pump.  And we will be talking about in a timely fashion perhaps a release of oil from the SPR.  This is important, not only to increase supply, but also to send a clear message to speculators that they do not call the shots.  The price at the pump is affected by the harmful speculation of some.  And again how we strategically use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is going to be very important and probably one of the quickest ways to take down the price at the pump.  Many others are investments so that we do not find ourselves in this situation again.

I am very pleased to be here with my colleagues, Congressman Ed Markey, who chairs the Natural Resources Committee, and has been a leader on this subject, and especially both of us are pleased to be here with our colleague, Tim Bishop, who has legislation on the floor, so we are going to be quick here because we have to go to the floor in terms of the previous question.  He will talk about--if we could defeat the previous question--what his legislation will do and what impact that will have on consumers.  Families, businesses, everybody is very, very affected by the price at the pump.  And we have to take the lead to make sure again that we are not in a place where the consumer is sabotaged by speculators, by price gouging and paying a double price by giving subsidies to those who are--some of whom are participating in those activities.  We want to find out.

With that I'm pleased to yield to--in this period because as you know at 10 o'clock we went in with the budget [talks].  This has an impact on the budget.  This is a budget that says to seniors pay more while we give subsidies to Big Oil.  Hopefully we can work that out in this group that he's put together because that's just not fair.  But the issue that we're talking about has an impact on jobs, it has an impact on the budget deficit.  It has an impact on our consumers and their ability to make ends meet.  Mr. Markey has worked on this issue for decades, and I'm pleased to thank him for his leadership and yield to him.

Congressman Markey.  Thank you so much.  As the leader just pointed out, the oil industry is reaping incredible profits from this time of unusual turmoil in the Middle East.  ExxonMobil reported $10.7 billion of profits in the first quarter, Shell, $8.8 billion, BP, $7.1 billion, Chevron, $6.2 billion, Conoco Philips, $3 billion.  So this is clearly something that has these companies on path to become the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world.

And what are we doing up on the House floor right now?  The Republicans are continuing their process of basically having a policy of not all of the above, but oil above all.  In their Republican budget that they've already passed on the House floor they slashed the clean energy budget, the renewable budget by 70 percent.  And as you are going to hear from Mr. Bishop, we right now are going to try to do our best to ensure that we are going to do our best to ensure that they pay their fair share of the taxes.  That's what Mr. Bishop is going to attempt to do here today.  To remove an age old tax break for manufacturers that is really meant to encourage people who make toasters or aluminum foil, but not for this industry.  They take unfair advantage of this tax break that the American taxpayers do not in fact have to subsidize them for, given the fact that the oil companies are already in their other pocket, their consuming pocket for windfall profits right now.  So that's our challenge.

Now, next week I will have legislation out on the floor that ensures that we do have a strategy to deploy the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  When President Bush the first used it during the first Persian Gulf War, the price of oil went down 33 percent.  When Bill Clinton used it in September and October of 2000, the price went down 18 percent.  When George Bush the second used it after Katrina, it went down 9 percent.

It is the message to speculators.  That is what keeps speculators awake at night worried about, that the United States is going to use this weapon in order to tell them that we are going to wring out all of the profits from your speculation in this marketplace.  Goldman Sachs has a report a couple of weeks ago that 20 percent of all the increase in the price of oil comes from these speculators.  We have to get that out of the marketplace.

So what is Mr. Bishop talking about here today?  He's talking about a very simple strategy the Republicans have.  Okay?  They want to cut Medicare dramatically.  Say to grandma, say to grandpa we are cutting the profit.  We are cutting the subsidies that we are giving to make sure that grandma and grandpa get the health care to which they are entitled to.  What do they do with the money?  They put an oil rig on top of it to drill into the pockets of grandma and grandpa to take that money to give it in subsidies to the oil industry as they are recording record profits.  That is what the Republican policy is and that is what we are going to try to stop as Democrats, because that is an immoral decision to say to the poor and the sick and the elderly that we're going to make your lives harder at a time when they are already very hard.  And make sure that the oil industry does not take advantage of their political power inside of the Republican Party.

GOP now stands for Gas and Oil Party and we're going to make sure that the American people understand that.  And Get Old People, simultaneously.

Let me turn now and recognize the gentleman who is leading the way here today, Congressman Tim Bishop of New York.

Congressman Tim Bishop.  Thank you very much.  And thank you, Ed, and thank you, Madam Leader.  If we are successful in defeating the previous question, we will offer legislation that I filed last week called the Big Oil Welfare Repeal Act, which would repeal the domestic manufacturing tax credit that oil companies have enjoyed since 2004.  With repeal, taxpayers would save approximately $13 billion over 10 years.  And there is simply no justification for continuing this tax credit, frankly this tax giveaway.

And I think the most powerful argument that one can make for passing the legislation that I've offered and also the simplest argument is that if anyone were to walk on the floor of the House today and say I have this fabulous idea, the oil companies are struggling, what we need to do is incentivize them to increase their domestic production, let's give them a tax credit to do that, they would be laughed out of the room.  No one would support that, no one would think that it had any validity at all.  Yet we continue to do it.

This is a part of a larger strategy that deals with additional tax credits that the oil companies enjoy.  It would deal with, as Mr. Markey talked about, release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  We would also deal with the issue of price gouging and we would deal with the issue of the last in/first out tax credit that the oil companies are able to enjoy.

So I'm very hopeful that we will be successful in defeating the previous question.  If we do not, at a minimum we would, will put Republicans on record as standing once again with Big Oil, doing so in a fashion that is to the detriment of every constituent they represent.

I thank the Leader for her leadership and I certainly thank Mr. Markey for his longtime advocacy for issues that are of are importance to the people he represents.

Leader Pelosi.  Thank you very much, Mr. Bishop.  I know we have to get to the floor because we have activity there but we are pleased to take a few questions.

Q:  Madam Leader and Mr. Markey, the summer driving season is ahead of us.  Heavy activity expected.  Even Mr. Hoyer said earlier this week that it would be dishonest to expect that anything could be done in the next 6 to 10 months to reduce gas prices, but everybody is really upset about it.  What realistically in the short term can you do?

Congressman Markey.  Again, the deployment of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a weapon that has a long history of success, especially in a period where Goldman Sachs has made it clear that upwards of 20 percent of all, of the rise in the price comes from speculators.  And we now see the largest presence of speculators in the marketplace, in the oil marketplace in history right at this moment, greater any of these other junctures.  So that is something that can happen right now.

In addition, I think that the Republicans are giving real comfort to the speculators by basically passing a budget which slashes the Commodities Futures Trading Commission budget.  Those are the cops on the beat.  Those are the people who these speculators should be afraid of.  The Republicans have already moved to slash that budget.  So instead of putting the fear of being apprehended into the hearts of these speculators by opposing the deployment of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, by slashing the budget for the CFTC, they are giving real comfort to them that this can continue on indefinitely.

We don't think that's the case.  We think there is a strategy here that can really give some comfort to consumers in the very near term.

Leader Pelosi.  If I may add to that, the SPR, releasing the oil not only increases supply, which has an impact on price, but again as Mr. Markey said, it sends a message to the speculators.  Other parts of our legislation where we are talking about price gouging, increasing the prosecutorial ability to go after price gougers sends a message to them.  So some of it has its own impact and some of it is hopefully a deterrent on others.  But we have got to, as you indicated in your question, think short term and long term so that we are not in this situation again.  And some of it again has an immediate impact.

But we have to make sure that the public knows there are answers to this, we are prepared to go forward with them in terms of clean technologies, other automobiles that do not even depend on the use of oil the way we do now mostly.  And so the public is very wise about this.  They want to see something happen that will make a difference short term and long term, and that is what we are proposing.

Q:  Madam Leader, Steny Hoyer said that he would support drilling as part of a comprehensive energy policy going forward.  Would you be supportive of that?

Leader Pelosi.  Sure, we have always been supportive of that.  Again, I will yield to Mr. Markey.  He will speak to the use it or lose it, which is part of our initiative.  We had the CLEAN Act, which had many ways to go forward using every domestic possibility we have for energy supply, but to do it in the right way.  But you can't say that is the answer and ignore the new technologies, ignore what is happening in terms of speculation and price gouging.  You have to have a complete package.

I would to yield to Mr. Markey because he has been such a leader on this use it or lose it and other approaches to sensibly increasing drilling in our country.

Congressman Markey.  Thank you.  Yes, number one, we do believe that the safety recommendations of the BP Spill Commission has been implemented.  That was a bipartisan commission chaired by George Bush the first's EPA Administrator Bill Reilly, and Senator Graham from Florida.  They concluded that there is a systemic failure of implementation of safety regulations in the U.S. oil industry offshore.  As proof of that, there are four times greater fatalities in drilling offshore in the United States than in European nations.

So our belief is that we should be number one in drilling but we should be number one in safety at the same time, and the Republicans refuse to allow any safety legislation to come to the floor of the House.  Senator McConnell killed the safety legislation that passed last summer in the House in the Senate at the end of the session last year.

Secondly, as the Leader pointed out, right now, the oil industry has bid for approximately 60 million acres of U.S. taxpayer owned land with oil under it in our country.  The Department of Interior has studied it and it appears to be somewhere around 11 billion barrels of oil is under that soil on American land.  The oil industry now has leased that land and they aren't drilling on it.  What we are saying as Democrats is that we are going to impose a fee on you, a use it or lose it fee, because under that land that they are now leasing but not drilling on there are thousands of tankers of oil that can be brought right into our country from our country that will provide the extra oil for our economic growth.

So again the oil industry does not want to do that, and yet they want to bid for new leases and what we are saying to them is we are going to put a fee on you on the old and if you don't renegotiate the old leases out in the Gulf where you do not pay any royalties at all, you as a company, you cannot bid.  So that's our formula to ensure that we have more oil which is drilled for, not less oil which is what the Republican strategy is.

Leader Pelosi.  Other oil companies, smaller ones, could use those opportunities that they are shutting down.

Q: Leader Pelosi, a question on another topic, a group of your colleagues were in here earlier that the death of bin Laden means that the President should conduct more than a token withdrawal this year from Afghanistan.  Do you support the effort to ask the President to submit a detailed plan to get out of the Afghanistan? 

Leader Pelosi.  I didn't see what they did because we were on the floor during this.  But let me say this; I was in Afghanistan over St. Patrick's Day weekend when we had a little break and what I saw there was for the first time very positive action being taken to transition us out, whether it was more intensity in terms of training the police and the military there to meet the security needs of the Afghan people, whether it was a more concerted effort in terms of what the civilian role will be as we phase out of the military.  Everyone that I met from the ambassador to the generals to the soldiers and marines that we met along the way were all about the transition out.  We know the American people are weary of this war.  We simply can't afford it.  It is huge.  We have been there a long time.  What more of an impact do we need to make?  Let's figure out what is in our national interest.

What I saw indicated to me that by July 2011 we will be meeting one of the withdrawal dates and then stay on schedule to do the rest.  I honestly have not seen what Mr. McGovern was putting forward, but I do know that the American people want us to draw that down.

I don't know how much of an impact the death of Osama bin Laden has on that.  He is a person, he is a symbol.  It is a historic event.  "Hail to the Chief."  He did a fabulous job.  But it isn't an end to the threat to our national security, and that is how we have to make the judgment.  But again our message to the President of Afghanistan and to others that I met was this has to come to an end.

Q:  Chairman Ryan is saying about the only short term deficit reduction efforts that can be accomplished now are cutting discretionary spending and some farm subsidies.  Do Democrats have an appetite for that?  Do you think that is doable?

Leader Pelosi.  I think we can, should go to that table with a very open mind and listen to what people have to say.  But we've been here before.  As you know, we had to sweep up after President Bush one and the deficit that he left, and President Clinton succeeded in doing that.  We passed our economic package in 1993.  It was very courageous legislation.  Some Members who voted for it didn't come back because it changed the revenue scheme of things.

I don't see how you can possibly talk about serious deficit reduction without talking about three things:  cuts in spending, waste, fraud and abuse, which we are always on the alert for, and a change in the revenue stream.  Now in our budget Mr. Van Hollen, who has come before you on any number of occasions, our budget uses some validation from the fiscal commission.  It looks at the Defense budget for additional cuts and looks at what they call revenue loopholes, others call them tax expenditures.  Whatever it is, it is a special deal for somebody that is increasing the deficit that we have to close, and perhaps then bring down the corporate tax rate.

I think all of us have an open mind as to what really reduces the deficit, promotes growth, creates jobs, and takes us on a path to, as President Clinton did, toward a surplus.  In his last four or five budgets we were either in surplus or in balance.  So this is as serious as it gets.  Democrats know how to reduce the deficit.  We had to do it before.  We will do it again and we will again do it in a way that has fairness to it.

Again not saying to seniors you have to pay more for less so we can give tax breaks to Big Oil; to saying to seniors you may not be able to stay in a nursing home because we are giving tax breaks to businesses to send jobs overseas; to saying to our kids and to our children we are going to cut the education budget and make college more expensive for nearly 10 million young adults so that we can give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our country.

These are just bad priorities for our country.  And investing in education--I say this all the time, I will say it again--brings more money to the Treasury than any initiative that you can name.  For us to cut education and investments in higher education that are suggested is to have a blueprint for planned obsolescence of our economy because education is the source of innovation and we have to have growth if we are go going to sustain balance in terms of our budget.

So we are all--it is a very exciting time.  This is what we come here to do, to have the debate about priorities, about where the revenues come from, what the investments should be.  And they should be fair.  They should provide opportunity and jobs, and they must reduce the deficit.

Thank you all very much.