September 7, 2017
I thank the gentlemen and I want to make clear that I am offering this amendment on behalf of Frank LoBiondo, who I know who has worked with my colleague Don Byer from Virginia on this by partisan measure.
I think it when to make sense that it would quite simply restrict money with a guard on seismic testing on the Atlantic waters and the waters of the Florida streets. Now why do I think that’s important? I think it is important because you don’t build a foundation, if you don’t intend to build a house. And yet fundamentally what we’re trying to do is move forward on something that I think begs this most Republican of questions, which is do we believe in home rule? Because at home every municipality of every town in hamlet along the coast of South Carolina has come out unanimously against the idea of all short drilling and seismic testing, not because they’re against fossil fuel, but simply because they believe that they want to determine themselves how the coast of South Carolina develops. And that’s obviously the case with many colleagues from Florida who have now headed home to deal with the hurricane and a whole host of other places up and down the Atlantic and again, the streets of Florida.
So, I think this amendment is fundamentally about if you believe that the government is most local, governs best. Not always, but generally, then might you not give this amendment a try because fundamentally what it says is places like Port Fourchon are nice, but what the people of South Carolina have determined is that we don’t want our coast to develop that way because of the amount of onshore that is necessary to support offshore operations. With that if I might, I would like to yield time to my colleague from Virginia, Mr. Byer.
(The amendment failed on a voice vote.)