Going Forward

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, one thing good about our country, we always go forward, not backwards. And we are not going to go backwards to allow the privatization of Social Security. We are not going to go backwards to allow the removal of important protections against Wall Street, abuses of the U.S. economy. We're going to go forward.

And we're not going to go backward on environmental protection. I'll say why this is important. This morning we were doing our investigation of the BP oil spill. We had President Bush's Secretary of the Interior, Gail Norton, testify. And you know what we discovered?

During the Bush administration's rapid ramp-up of offshore drilling, they learned that 50 percent of the blow-out preventers that were supposed to be the fail-safe system to prevent these massive oil spills, 50 percent of them didn't work. But they refused to do anything about it.

They learned that they had a problem with their own investigators, that the wells weren't being cemented appropriately, but they refused to do anything about it.

We are not going to let folks go backwards on Social Security, go backwards on Wall Street reform, or go backwards on environmental protection. This is a country that goes forward.

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