Keystone XL Pipeline Act--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I just wish to speak briefly to this amendment, which I hope might help answer the mystery as to why the first order of business of the new majority in the Senate is S. 1, a bill that allows a foreign corporation to run a pipeline across our country, seizing American farms and ranches along the way. That would not ordinarily seem to be our country's first and highest order of business given all of the issues that we face.

We have seen news reports just today that the legendary Koch brothers are gearing up to spend $900 million in the coming election. We have seen news reports that compare their political operation to the Republican National Committee's political operation--favorably to the Koch brothers as having a bigger political operation.

We know that since Citizens United there has been a torrent of corporate money poured into our elections, and a great deal of it has come from the fossil fuel industry. We know also that beside that torrent of disclosed money has been another torrent of dark money that has poured into our elections. We don't know quite where that has come from, but there are plenty of reasons to suspect and to suggest that money has also come from the fossil fuel industry.

So we have a situation right now where I think reasonable people could look at the facts and draw a sensible inference that the Republican Party has been acquired by the fossil fuel industry as its political subsidiary. If that were the case, then that might be an explanation of why S. 1 does this extraordinary service to a foreign corporation at peril to all of the American farms and ranches and families whose land would be taken from them in order to give this foreign corporation this great boon.

This amendment would require that companies that will make more than $1 million off of the Keystone Pipeline should meet the disclosure obligations that we have voted on before in the Senate. These are disclosure obligations that Republican Senators have often supported in the past.

Indeed, until 2010 and until the Citizens United decision actually showed where the money was coming from and to whom it was going, one of the most ardent and eloquent advocates for disclosure was none other than the distinguished Senator from Kentucky who is now our majority leader. So it would not seem to be out of place to ask for a little bit of disclosure, a little bit of transparency, about where the political contributions went from the corporations that are going to make so much money from this, whether it is more than $1 million made off the pipeline or whether it is opening up the tar sands and having tar sands leases.

So I hope we will have a chance to vote on this, and if we are in favor of transparency and disclosure and voters understanding what is going on around here, this ought to be an amendment we ought to be able to support.

With that, I yield the floor.

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