Minimum Wage Fairness Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I appreciate the leadership from the Senator from North Dakota. He has been a champion of this important program that enjoys the support of huge bipartisan majorities all across the country because they understand the importance of energy security. They understand the importance of getting this energy from a friendly country such as Canada. They understand the jobs that go along with it. They understand the need for hard-working American families to have affordable energy, whether it is gasoline, heating fuel or the like. So this makes sense on so many different levels, but I have to say that really the biggest obstacle is the Federal Government itself.

Not approving this pipeline makes exactly zero sense. I know some people are put off a little bit--I would say to the Senator from North Dakota--by the idea of a new pipeline as if this is some novel creation. But just as an exercise in my own personal edification, I happened to Google--or maybe it was Bing or some other search engine--``oil and gas pipelines'' on the Internet, and I was astonished at the huge complex interplay of oil and gas pipelines all across the United States of America. Most Americans aren't even aware they exist because they safely operate, and they move this oil and gas around the country in a way that benefits our economy and creates jobs and helps us put people back to work which is the most important thing we can do.

So we know for the last 5 years, since the great recession, we have had an economy characterized by stubbornly slow economic growth and persistently high unemployment. We have the smallest percentage of people actually participating in the workforce since World War II. We have seen a decline in median household incomes, so average hard-working families have seen their income go down, and we have seen this nagging sense of uncertainty about the future, not just because of the economy but because of the obstacles the Federal Government puts in its way.

I would ask the Senator from North Dakota--I know that North Dakota has had some experience here--by not building this pipeline, what are the other ways that this oil is being transported, and what is the risk and benefit associated with that? People may think this is sort of an either/or--you either have the oil flow or not. But the truth is there are other alternatives, but they are not necessarily in the public interest or as safe as this pipeline might be.

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I know there are other Senators who wish to speak, and I will conclude on this point. It is with some sense of appreciation that I note the two lowest unemployment rate cities and regions in the country are, I believe, Bismarck, ND, and Midland-Odessa, the Permian Basin in Texas. Not coincidentally, those are the sites of some of the shale gas and the oil and gas production we are seeing that is thanks to modern drilling techniques and innovative practices that produce this American renaissance in energy, for which we should be enormously grateful.

This is the way to get our economy back on track. This is the way to extract ourselves from dangerous parts of the world and unreliable sources of energy. And this is the way to get Americans back to work.

I thank the Senator for his leadership, and I am happy to participate in this colloquy. Thank you.

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