Sen. Menendez is author of legislation to permanently ban drilling in OCS, has led numerous defeats of offshore drilling amendments over the past year

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Today, Senator Menendez blasted the Bush-McCain plan:

“As if John McCain wouldn’t have a hard enough time selling the American people on this over-hyped plan, it now has the stamp of approval from a president who is an oil man and who has been wrong on just about every issue over eight years. Giving another handout to oil companies while they sit on 68 million acres of unused land leased to them by the American taxpayer is absurd. It’s time that this government stopped bending over backward for oil companies and instead prodded them to get to work on the huge tracts of unused land already at their disposal.

“To hear George Bush and John McCain say it, you’d think gasoline is going to run straight out of the ground and right into your car. What they either don’t want to tell the public or simply choose to ignore is that it will take at least a decade to see any production out of those areas, and even then it will just be a drop in the bucket. This is not a relief plan for American families, it’s a relief plan for oil companies.”

http://menendez.senate.gov/newsroom/record.cfm?id=299312