Governmental Overreach

Floor Speech

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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered a gut punch to the body politic here in the United States with the Dobbs decision. This is the largest governmental overreach into the private lives of American citizens in the history of our lifetime. This is Big Government coming into our doctors' offices, coming into our bedrooms, a small group of people trying to control American citizens, make women second-class citizens. And I believe that the vast majority of the American people are absolutely exhausted and want the government out of their lives, out of our personal lives.

Justice Thomas' opinion about nullifying marriages, about getting rid of birth control, is an extreme overreach. This is a country built on freedom, and it is time for us to stand up; the exhausted majority, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, saying we want limited government, and we want it out of the private lives of American citizens, especially the women of the United States. Opportunities in Natural Gas

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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I rise to talk about a very important issue in this country. This country is a country that has been and was founded on the idea of freedom. This country has fed more people, clothed more people, cured more people, and liberated more people than all the other countries in the world combined. And the source of American power has always been the great American middle class which we need to have an aggressive policy to rebuild. And the strength of the American middle class has always been connected to our energy policy.

Do we have a policy in this country that will allow us to dominate the world in manufacturing, to dominate the industries of the future, to keep costs low for both business and consumers?

And so I am rising here today in support of this permitting process bill that we will be voting on here this week.

This is an important opportunity for us to mobilize and move the natural gas industry in places like Ohio to both reduce costs here for manufacturers and consumers and for us to export this product abroad to make sure our allies in Europe are able to get cheap natural gas so that they are not hooked on Vladimir Putin.

There is an opportunity here to sell to China, which is putting on one coal-fired power plant a week.

This is both a jobs bill; this is about putting money in people's pockets by reducing energy costs; and this is about helping our allies abroad.

The number one country to reduce CO2 from 2005 to 2020 was the United States of America because natural gas replaced coal. If we do that around the world, we have an opportunity in the next 5 to 10 years to dramatically reduce carbon around the world and meet some of our climate change goals.

This permitting bill is acknowledging the fact that the average duration of some of these projects is 4\1/2\ years to get the permits, and 25 percent of these projects take 6 years. If you are doing a hydrogen project, 5 years and 11 Federal and State agencies.

You wonder why the average American is so frustrated or the average businessperson is so frustrated to interface with the American Government. As a business or a consumer, for that matter, it is maddening. It is limiting our ability to create jobs here in the United States, to power the United States, and to meet our climate goals. This is a win across the board.

This permitting bill is for 42 percent of the DOE projects or for clean energy transmission or conservation. Only 15 percent is for fossil fuels. But it is all gummed up, and we can't get any progress.

This bill is an opportunity for us to provide some framework to streamline this process so that we can get moving on some of these projects so that we can dominate these industries in the future.

In my district, we have two natural gas power plants. We need more. We want to build electric vehicles, electric trucks, electric cars, electric tractors, batteries, solar panels. We want to move into hydrogen. We have so many opportunities in this country, but it is gummed up by an old, corroded government that doesn't know how to interface with business.

I am supportive of this permitting bill. I think we need to streamline this process. We need to juice up the natural gas industry, as well as the other industries in the future. This is a red, white, and blue energy policy and permitting process bill. We need to support it on both sides of the aisle.

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