Executive Session

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BOOZMAN. Madam President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota for his leadership and for, again, spearheading this effort. I thank all the Senators who are here and are, in a very bipartisan way, trying to move this project forward.

We speak a lot about jobs in regard to this project, but that simply cannot be overemphasized. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, most of the largest labor unions--major labor unions--all agree that if this pipeline were to go forward, which it has to do, it would create 250,000 jobs; 20,000 of those tomorrow, almost immediately. Again, it is so important.

It is important to my home State because many businesses, many hard-working Americans living there would benefit tremendously. We have a large Nucor plant. That Nucor plant in Blytheville, AK, in Mississippi County, would supply a lot of the iron that would be used. We have another facility, Welspun Tubular Company, they make oil pipe. They have 500 miles of this pipe sitting in storage that they have produced to go forward, which should be a great thing. The problem is instead of increasing employment for the future, right now they have had to lay off workers because of the indecision.

So there are all kinds of reasons we need to do this. Others have talked about national security reasons, but the labor--the good-paying jobs that would be created, again, not being dependent on places such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, that is a pretty good deal, and we need to move forward immediately.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source