And a whole lot else, for that matter. The House Majority Whip cracked down with some cogent commentary on Washington, some stinging rejoinders for the current Administration, and some cautionary tales for our industry and anyone who cares about public policy in the Permian and the nation.
On Sept. 15, U.S. Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.), majority whip in the House, provided the keynote address at the monthly Permian Basin Petroleum Association luncheon in Midland. Introduced to the attendees by PBPA President Ben Shepperd, the Congressman addressed the membership, speaking about overcoming misconceptions in Washington and elsewhere about the oil and gas industry, and responding to questions from those in attendance. PBOG has recorded and transcribed Scalise’s talk from that afternoon, and we share his top-level (and enlightening) views, lightly edited for reading clarity only:
Steve Scalise: “…I appreciate the invitation. It’s great to be here in Midland, Texas. Louisiana and Texas have a lot in common. Our districts have a lot in common. I represent, in addition to some of the City of New Orleans and all the suburbs, I represent Houma, Louisiana, and Port (of Terrebonne, specifically, which is the hub for all of the deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the things that I’ve been doing since I came to Congress in 2008 is bring members of Congress from other states that don’t understand the energy industry, don’t see it on a regular basis like us. I bring those members of Congress down to South Louisiana. It’s not hard to get them to come down—we’ve got some pretty good food down there if you hadn’t heard, and a lot of other interesting things.
“We take them out to a deep-water rig in the Gulf of Mexico. We’ve been doing that every year and we have more than enough people requesting. Our limitation is how many people you can fit on the helicopter every year, but the industry is great about working with us and making those resources available. Members of Congress walk away just blown away with the technology, with the abilities that are out there, especially when you talk about drilling in over 5,000 feet of water in the Gulf. Just seeing what’s available in terms of job opportunities. Seeing young people, out of high school, starting maybe over $60,000 a year with great career opportunities. It’s one of those things where we’ve done, I think, a really great job over the last few years of making our case to people that are not from Texas, and Louisiana, and Oklahoma, where the traditional energy industry has always been, especially as it relates to oil and gas.
“What frac’ing has done—and this is an American-made ingenuity, America came up with this—[is that] people from here in Texas, people from Louisiana, came up with this great technology that’s revolutionizing the world but it’s brought manufacturing back to the United States. We were losing manufacturing in a large part because of energy, because of a lot of radical regulations coming out of Washington. You saw a lot of those manufacturing jobs moving to other countries where they didn’t have those same kinds of limitations. Just the revolution of shale, being able to find it through horizontal drilling and hydraulic frac’ing, has allowed us to bring it back but that has not stopped these unelected bureaucrats in Washington from trying to figure out how to reverse that, how to slow it down, how to put more roadblocks in the way for the things that you do here, for the things that we do there.”
“We’ve got to restore some sanity back in this process and the REINS Act would do more than anything else.” Scalise shared his thoughts on legislation that he thinks holds a chance at turning the tide in DC.
After introducing himself and delineating his connection to oil and gas, Congressman Scalise delved straight into addressing the nationwide political climate surrounding the industry. He proceeded to give his perspective on the meatiest of beefs between the industry and Washington:
“I think what’s helped us is that now you’ve got so many states in the energy business that weren’t before. Like in Ohio… I’ve been out to eastern Ohio where the Utica is. These were places that the manufacturing revolution had passed them by. A lot of them where ghost towns that are now booming because of energy. You go to Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania shale plays have forced the state of New York to start debating whether or not they should be frac’ing. These are folks that never believed in any kind of American energy and all of a sudden they’re watching their neighbors one county over. All of a sudden they’ve got people working, they’re making good money, and they’re producing energy. All the myths they were hearing about, you turn on the faucet and natural gas is coming out of there and you can put the lighter, all these movies with this hocus-pocus stuff. Every report that’s come out on frac’ing has said it doesn’t do anything to contaminate ground water. It’s a safe process as long as the states regulate it, which the states know how to do much better than the federal government. It works incredibly well. So people in New York are going, ‘Why don’t we do that too?’ All the radical environmentalists that run around saying all this crazy stuff, they’re looking at their neighbors next-door saying it’s not happening. They’re asking real tough questions and, frankly, because of the great work that you all do, it’s forcing answers that they weren’t expecting.
“So, when you look at where we are now, we’ve still got big challenges. I won’t even get into all of the other crazy challenges coming out of Washington. It’s been talking about Obamacare. I was there in 2009. I had just gotten on the Energy Commerce Committee. I want to tell you, before I get into this I want to thank you for the members you send to Congress. We’re [here in] Mike Conway’s district. Mike Conway’s a great friend of mine. He’s a member of the whip team. We’ve got a core group of members that are on the whip team that help us move a conservative agenda and Mike’s been there…
“…He’s, of course, got an energy background himself. To have people that have actually lived and worked in the industry represent people like you, seeing the things that you’re facing every day, and when you run into problems, we’re able to take those problems that you’re hearing. The Endangered Species Act, how that thing has been abused over the decades, and we need more scrutiny on it. We ought to start sunsetting some of these laws that have been on the books. You look at how they’re abusing the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act. It just doesn’t end anywhere.
“I asked all of our colleagues how they felt about lifting the [crude oil export] ban. What was surprising was, first of all, the opposition was very limited. There were just a few members that were opposed to it and most members were for it… Lifting this ban is good for the economy. It’s good for the consumer, it’s good for American energy security.” Scalise showed himself to be simpatico with the PBPA’s stand on this key issue.
“They’ve got a couple of counties up in Michigan where nobody lives… and they’re going to be out of compliance because of the air coming in from Illinois. They can’t do anything about that. Are they just going to shut down the whole state? This is ludicrous, and yet these other elected bureaucrats wake up every morning, you’re waking up every morning trying to figure out how to make payroll, trying to figure out how to keep the business going, with the oil prices low, but still trying to produce American energy so these people, these elites can get on their private planes flying around, telling people how they ought to use wind and solar when it’s something that’s going to destroy our economy.
“Good luck. Let’s go develop all the renewable sources of energy. I’m all for that, but you also have to be able to live in the real world and recognize it takes nuclear power, it takes oil, it takes natural gas, and it does take coal as well, which is one of the most efficient sources of energy that we’re shipping out of our country right now because the President has made it impossible to burn American coal here. We had the Secretary of EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) before our committee a couple of years ago. This was when Lisa Jackson used to be the administrator of the EPA.
“You thought, ‘Hey, we finally got rid of Lisa Jackson. She’s working at Apple now.’ Well, she leaves and then they bring in Gina McCarthy right behind her who was her deputy. She’s just as bad in terms of the crazy regulations that they spew out. They’re talking about cap and trade. They passed cap and trade on the House… They did ObamaCare. They did Dodd-Frank. All of that became law. Chris Dodd and Barney Frank both left Congress after things ended… and you got to try to live with it. It’s destroying all of our community banks that have nothing to do with the meltdown, but then it moved cap and trade through the House.
The congressman hobnobbed with PBPA members after the luncheon concluded.
“It has absolutely no ability to work, literally. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce couldn’t come up with a better plan to destroy the American economy… If that thing would have passed, imagine what it would do. As bad as things are now, imagine if cap and trade was in place, and yet they’re still trying to come behind with regulations that do de facto cap and trade. They’re not done. You look at the latest regulations they come out with.
“As they’re coming out with all this stuff, it’s all under the guise of ‘we’re going to save the planet.’ Global warming is the biggest threat. We’ve had more hearings in DC cancelled on global warming during the winter because of snow… you can’t make this stuff up. Literally, we’ve had hearing after hearing, Chris tells us, on global warming and then literally there’d be snow coming and you do this in December. We’re going to have many hearings in December and January on it, but they talk about all this stuff and then they come up with these regulations that make no sense. It’s all about, ‘let’s reduce carbon in America.’ Well, we’re reducing carbon in America without it. We didn’t sign Kyoto.
“All the countries that signed the Kyoto Treaty, they’ve wrecked their economies. They’re trying to get out of it right now. We didn’t sign on because it was unworkable. What happened during that period, the countries that signed it, their carbon emissions are just as bad, if not worse. Ours are going down, in part because of natural gas, in part mostly because we actually have good environmental standards. We’re stewards of our environment in the United States of America. You listen to environmental issue you think that we wake up every day and people are out destroying the planet.
“If you had cap and trade today, you literally couldn’t make steel in this country. You couldn’t manufacture most goods in this country, but you know what, China would do it. India would do it. Brazil would do it, because they don’t [have] cap and trade. You know what else they don’t have? They don’t have the standards we have today, so I told Lisa Jackson, the administrator at the time when they were trying to move this through, I said, ‘If you’re able to get your way and if you run those steel plants,’ we haven’t built the steel plants in South Louisiana. We’re getting ready to do it… They said, ‘If cap and trade goes through, we’re moving the plant to Brazil.’ They already made the decision. It’s either/or. It’s going to be in America. We would have gotten it in South Louisiana, but if cap and trade goes through, we can’t make steel in America so we’re going to build the plant in Brazil.
“Do you know that it emits five times the amount of carbon to build the same steel in Brazil as if you built it in America? What are you trying to do here? If you’re concerned about carbon emissions, if you think man is destroying the planet and it’s carbon emissions that are doing it, then if you force through this legislation, that steel plant [is] to be built in Brazil, [and] you’re going to be responsible for emitting five times the amount of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere. It all ends up in the same place. They had no answer.
“This is all crazy, crazy radical regulations that make no sense, but they try to get people [to buy] in by saying, ‘Hey look. We’re all for saving the planet. Who’s against saving the planet? Let’s go pass this regulation.’ You know what? We’re reading the regulations. You’re reading the regulations. People speak out and say, ‘This makes absolutely no sense,’ but that doesn’t stop them. They wake up the next morning with something else just as bad and you’ve got to go fight in the courts. The good news is we’d beaten them. Most of the time we fight these things in the court, but it’s years and years and the uncertainty, the investment that’s not being made in America during those three or four years before we finally win the lawsuit, and then the next morning they wake up and come up with something just as bad.
“I want to [touch on] one piece of legislation. I’ll touch on a couple of others before I’m rambling all around, but I do want to take your questions too. There’s a bill we passed a couple of weeks ago that most people have never heard about that literally would transform the way all of these federal agencies interact with people in the real world, people like you that actually have to wake up every morning and go make stuff, to make our country the greatest in America while they’re trying to stop you from being able to do it. It’s called the REINS Act.
“What the REINS Act says is any unelected bureaucrat that comes up with some idea, if it’s a rule or regulation that’s not written in law, or a law [that] might give an agency some jurisdictions and flexibility to go write a rule or regulation, but if they come up with a regulation that has an impact on the economy, it has to first go through the elected representatives of the people. I run for re-election every two years. If I would vote yes or no on a bill, I’m going to be held accountable to some (un)elected bureaucrat at the EPA or the IRS or the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) or the Corps of Engineers, with Waters of the U.S., you name the alphabet soup of federal agencies that come up with this stuff. They’re not held accountable to anybody.
“Why not make that the jurisdiction of Congress? If they come with an idea and it’s really good, if it’ll stop kids from [getting] asthma, which every regulation they have says the same thing and doesn’t do any of it, but they’re never held accountable on it. Why not make us accountable? If it’s a good regulation, put it on C-SPAN. Make them come testify under oath, present the science which most of the time, by the way, they don’t. They love talking about science deniers. They use some of the most phony science you can imagine to try to justify some of the stuff. Make them come and be transparent on C-SPAN and present it.
“If it’s a really good idea, we’re going to vote for it because people will be calling my office and saying, ‘Let’s do that.’ If it’s a really bad idea, like most of them…we vote it down and go on our way. You don’t have to worry about every day… how are we going to fight this in the courts and raise millions of dollars and hold our economy back for those years that we’re fighting it? It makes common sense. I say that because I don’t think this president would support that legislation even when it got to his desk. We passed it out of the House. It’s sitting over in the Senate.
“Hopefully, these are the kinds of things that the presidential candidates are going to be talking about. Rick Perry just got out so you’ve got 16 of them. Whatever you’re looking for in the presidential race, you’ve probably got two or three people that fit the bill right now. There’s a lot of candidates that are talking about some of these things, but I would hope that our candidates pick up on things like the REINS Act because, as you’re living in the real world, all I hear about from my small businesses in my district [is that] the regulations coming out of Washington [are] the biggest impediments to doing their jobs every day, the biggest.
“Not the competitors down the street. Not the competitors in the foreign countries. It’s the rules and regulations coming out of Washington. We’ve got to restore some sanity back in this process and the REINS Act would do more than anything else. Look, we fight some of these regulations every day and you bring the cabinet secretaries in. You [move pass?] the legislation. You reject the policy that they come out with, but you have to get that through the Senate. You’d have to hope President Obama would sign the bill. Good luck there.
“Something that would actually address this across the board, the Endangered Species Act, the Sage Grouse. They’re using that in the Northeast to stop projects from going forward, Waters of the U.S. I represent South Louisiana. If it rains, everything is a wetland. We’re the Waters of the U.S. in South Louisiana. You can’t develop anything. What does that have to do with mitigation or any of the other things that they’re supposed to be responsible for? I applaud you for waking up every morning and continuing to do what you do because it’s tough and sadly it’s a lot of the things coming out of Washington that are making things tough.
“Look, obviously with the price of oil, it’s changed things in the energy industry, and we see it. We’ve had layoffs in South Louisiana. You see a lot of boats tied up, but you still see people figuring out new innovative ways to do things. One of the things we’re working on that I do think there’s some good news on is oil exports. When you look at the ban on oil exports, it goes back to 1974. If it made sense back then, I don’t know, but when OPEC said they were going to embargo the United States, our policymakers said, ‘Okay, we’ll show them. We’ll prohibit our companies from selling their product anywhere.’ The law has been on the books since then.
“People have been afraid to touch it for years, but I will tell you this. Joe Barden took this on as a cause last year when nobody was talking about lifting the ban on oil exports when the price was over $100 a barrel. Joe said, ‘You know what, this doesn’t make any sense to have this on the books.’ He and I talked about it…
“I just got elected to House leadership and I said, ‘Let me help try to start making the case with our other leaders, with the Speaker, with the majority leader.’ Over the course of [a] couple of months, Joe started building support in the House, not just with Republicans, but with Democrats. He’s got over a dozen Democrats now signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. Then if you look over the last few months… as the price started dropping, layoffs started happening, not just in Texas, not just in Louisiana… North Dakota’s laying people off. Everywhere in the country.
“More and more members of Congress start to go, ‘Wait a minute. I’m hearing from my producers that this would help. It’s not the silver bullet, but if you lifted this ban, it would actually help things. I heard you’re working on it. Let’s see if we can help.’ We’ve gotten to a point now where, just in July, I told the Speaker, I said, ‘This is something I think we should move to the next level.’ I said, ‘I’m going to whip the membership.’
“One of the things [about] being a whip, you get to ask all the members how they feel about an issue, whether it’s coming to the floor or getting ready to come to the floor. I said, ‘This is what we ought to press to a higher level.’ I asked all of our colleagues how they felt about lifting the ban. What was surprising was, first of all, the opposition was very limited. There were just a few members that were opposed to it and most members were for it. There were core members that were undecided on it, didn’t know enough about it. We put a good packet of information together with a lot of good factual data that back up why lifting this ban is good for the economy. It’s good for the consumer, it’s good for American energy security.
“I feel real confident that before the end of this year, we could have that bill actually signed into law, not only passed out onto the House, but passed onto Senate and signed into law. That is hopefully some good news, because you don’t get much right now coming out of Washington. I could go on about a lot of other things. I’d love to hear some of your questions because you’re out there living in the real world here in the Permian Basin. Conway should represent you well. Give me some info on Conway. [laughter] Give me something I don’t know about Conway that I can use against him tomorrow night when I see him up in Washington…”
After his address, Congressman Scalise opened up the floor to questions. Ben Shepperd served as moderator, fielding the questions and posing them to Scalise:
Ben Shepperd: “You’ve talked about exports and clearly everybody here supports the efforts and it appears that you have optimism about the Senate, so we’re excited about that. What about Waters of the U.S.? What kind of progress? …I know you’re having some debates on that issue as well.”
Scalise: “Yeah, we moved about half of the appropriations bills that fund the government. There’s 12 different bills that fund the government. We passed six… on the House. The Senate hasn’t taken any of them up. One of the bills that we passed out is the bill that has jurisdiction over the Corps of Engineers in Waters of the U.S. We put an amendment on that bill to roll that regulation back. I’ll tell you when we had the debate on it and when we had the vote on it, it was incredibly bi-partisan. This is not just a Republican issue. There are members of Democrat districts all across the country that are experiencing the exact same thing that you’re experiencing on how unworkable it is.
“It’s completely unworkable. Where the Corps of Engineers came up with it, I don’t know. I don’t try to get in their heads anymore because most of that stuff doesn’t make sense. When you look at the opposition, it is very widespread across the country and it’s very bi-partisan, which means there’s a chance to try to roll that back by the end of this year. We’re going to keep that battle going. A lot of ammunition out there about why this is bad, what damage it’s doing to every part of the country, not just yours. Obviously it’s affecting you here. We’re trying to roll it back and hopefully before the end of this year we can get some agreement there.”
Shepperd: “Thank you for that. I know there’s some questions out here. I guess our third big pivotal priority, at least as far oil and gas, as we’ve already talked about is ESA (Endangered Species Act). It’s my suspicion, given all the other non-oil and gas or energy related things… I know you’re pushing some other policy forward as well. What about ESA in 2016(?)? Are we going to need a new President before any of that’s realistic?”
Scalise: “To get it done completely, yes, you’ll need a new president. There [have] been some things…I mean, the Sage Grouse—we were actually able to get agreement on in Congress last year. The President signed that. That was part of a bigger package. That was something where you had…I mean, to get any of these resolved during President Obama’s tenure, it’s going to take a lot of Democrats joining in with us to get it done. That was one where you’re starting to get more members as far as endangered species. To get into a broader reform of the ESA, the radical environmentalists use that as probably one of their primary tools to stop… I mean, they hate fossil fuels. The war on coal is real.
“You talk to our colleagues that represent coal states. It’s devastating. I’ve been out to some of the states and visited some of my colleagues who have coal districts. You want to talk about fear. I went to a coal mine in Ohio. I’ve never been into a coal mine. I went to meet with some of the workers. It was probably about this many people. A lot of young people. First thing I asked was, ‘How many of you are multi-generational?’ Almost every single hand went up. Their father did it, their grandfather was in the coal business. You could see the only thing you looked at when you looked out at the crowd was fear. Truly fearing for their way of life because this President… I mean, he said it when he ran in 2008. He said he’s going to bankrupt the coal industry. He set out to do it.
“It doesn’t end there. I mean, I know some people that are big on natural gas say, ‘That’s good for natural gas.’ It’s not. Because once they’re done with coal they’re coming after natural gas. They’re going to keep coming after oil. They want to regulate frac’ing. We’ve got to go after what they’re doing every way we can and highlight it, because [of] this President… You look at Keystone Pipeline. The labor unions who are no big supporter of mine… labor unions wanted this. Everybody wanted it except the small group of radical environmentalists for reasons that are completely unjustified, but the President sided with them. Turned away probably over four, five billion dollars of private investment, over forty-thousand jobs. Would have been more than that but I used the White House’s numbers. Over forty-thousand jobs they turned away because some radical environmentalist said they don’t want the Keystone Pipeline. When the radical environmentalists use ESA, clearly that’s something that they’re going to keep pushing the President to back them up on. That’s what we’re going up against.”
Scalise went on to answer a few more questions from the group. The last few questions were inaudible in our recordings, but Scalise’s answers provided enough context and content to stand on their own:
Scalise: “It’s a huge problem. It’s something that we’ve addressed on the House side. I know in the Senate they’ve had some hearings on this where… and EPA is maybe the worst offender but you see it in other places too where an agency gets sued by, in essence, one of their friends. I mean, if EPA’s getting sued by some radical environmental group… when Jeanne McCarthy goes in the room with them you want to listen to what’s going on because it’s probably two people that are colluding. Yet they do it behind closed doors. Not the way that you would have to do it if you were suing them or they were suing you.
“They’d do it behind closed doors and they come out basically with a solution that doesn’t have a problem. They’ll say, ‘We’ve come up with a great agreement,’ that’s going to cost the taxpayers money, usually. They also agree to some really bad policies that aren’t even in law. ‘Sue and settle’ is a…it’s a dangerous way of making policy de facto behind closed doors. It’s not the way any administration should operate. Especially the President, who said he’s going to be the most transparent in the history of our country. We’ve been fighting it but again this is one of the many tools that they use to try to implement some of their radical agenda.”
The last question of the day fielded by Scalise prompted him to address international politics and they ways in which they have affected oil and gas:
“I don’t know how readily aware the whole country is about this deal but I know over the last couple of weeks more people have been paying attention, focusing on it as we came up to the vote. We had a vote last week on it, which is not the end of this fight. If you look at this deal… the first flaw was… we had some sanctions that we had passed well over a decade. Congress… you only hear about the stuff that we do where we fight and it’s partisan and there’s truly a lot of that [happening] in an incredibly bi-partisan way. Congress over years had built and added sanctions against Iran to stop them from developing a nuclear weapons program.
“If you look at the last round of sanctions that we passed in 2012, which were really the most devastating… when you talk to Prime Minister Netanyahu about this and others, they will tell you the 2012 sanctions that Congress passed, over 400 members of the House. Imagine 435 of us total… Over 400 House members, Republican [and] Democrat combined, voted to impose those sanctions. The President didn’t want to. When he saw the huge vote coming out of the House… [the] huge vote coming out of the Senate, he signed it. When they went into effect they devastated Iran’s economy.
“The whole target was to dismantle the nuclear weapons program. Iran says, ‘Okay, we’re on the brink now. Our economy’s in shambles. We want relief.’ They came to the table. The first [stage] of any negotiation at that point should have been, ‘Okay, we put the sanctions on to get you to dismantle your nuclear weapons program. You want relief from the sanctions [and] this is what’s going to have to happen. It’s going to involve at the end of the deal…you getting a hundred-plus billion in frozen assets and all the other things. It’s going to involve you dismantling the program.’ That’s not what happened. That’s not how the President and John Kerry started negotiation.
“They started saying, ‘We want to use this group called the P5+1,’ which is a group of countries that includes China and Russia with Iran. They said, ‘We want to get an agreement with Iran that China and Russia will agree to.’ It’s got Great Britain, it’s got Germany, it’s got France. Ultimately, look at what Russia’s doing right now. If you’re going to start a negotiation that’s going to end and Iran, Russia and China all signing off on it… Russia, by the way, is now negotiating to sell their intercontinental ballistic weapons to Iran, which they can use to develop and send a nuclear bomb to an American city.
“Iran’s got a huge profit motive with Russia. When they started the negotiation with that group it was doomed from the beginning. You were not going to get a result that ended up in Iran dismantling a nuclear weapons program. That’s what you have now. You have a program that says, ‘At the end of this, if Iran follows everything…’ By the way, they cheat. Every agreement Iran has had they cheat. If they don’t cheat at all probably within months they will get unfrozen over a hundred billion dollars in assets. They’ll have more then five-thousand centrifuges to enrich uranium, if they comply with everything.
“Again, if you look at five-thousand centrifuges what does that mean? Pakistan developed a nuclear bomb with around three-thousand centrifuges. Under this deal Iran will be able to keep over five-thousand centrifuges, more modern technology in centrifuge then Pakistan has. This is the deal that the President says it such a good deal. Like everything there’s always a straw man. With ObamaCare it was, ‘Republicans are against it because they want people to die on the streets.’ No, we just don’t want people to pay thirty-percent more every year for healthcare that they don’t need, that they don’t want while every doctors getting out the business.
“On Iran, he says it’s the choice between this deal and war. Could be nothing more ludicrous. This deal lets Iran have a nuclear bomb at the end of the agreement if they comply with everything. If they cheat they get it quicker. The President will acknowledge in twelve years they’ll be weeks away from the breakout time from not only a nuclear bomb but a nuclear arsenal, the ability to make as many bombs as they need. Then ICBMs from Russia, which again were added to the deal at the last minute, so that they can send to an American city. They’re already saying what they’re going to do to Israel. They don’t need an ICBM to do that to Israel…
“These are the guys that the President is going to give a hundred-plus billion dollars to, the world’s largest sponsor to terrorism. It’s nuts. It’s dangerous. It’s going to ultimately lead to our kids having to face the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. It’s the worst deal you can imagine. We voted to reject it last week. You got a record vote now. Didn’t pass in the Senate. We had enough votes to kill it in the House. The next president can unravel most of this. The problem is Iran will than have over a hundred billion. The money that’s frozen up right now, that we can hold, that money even if you re-impose sanctions…snap back the term that Secretary Kerry uses. They’ve already got the money at that point. They already spent a hundred billion, with Hamas, with Hezbollah, all the other… It’s as bad as you can imagine it. It’s the reason that Prime Minister Netanyahu came and, I think, made one of the most impassioned pleas that a world leader has made from the House floor earlier this year.”
For more thoughts from Rep. Scalise, see also our coverage in the November print edition of the magazine, which will appear in the first week of November (in mailboxes) and which can be accessed online, in flipbook form, at pbog.com by about Nov. 1.