Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for yielding me 5 minutes to discuss this bill we are going to vote on, the cloture vote we are going to have in relation to the energy legislation a little later this morning.

One of the objections that has been raised to this legislation is that it still contains a so-called energy tax package. It is very different from what the House passed. 

Senator Baucus has worked with Senator Grassley to take out provisions that were objectionable to Members, particularly on the Republican side, but it is still a tax package. 

Now, what does it do? What it does is extends the tax incentives and credits we put into law in 2005. Those are the tax incentives, the tax credit for the production of electricity from wind, biomass from our clean energy sources. It provides the extension of the solar energy investment tax credit. It provides an extension of residential solar credits to encourage people to use solar heating and energy generation in their own residences. It provides an extension of existing credits for biodiesel. 

It creates a new credit for producing ethanol made from nonfood cellulosic material. It tries to extend into the future and expand upon the incentives we put into law in 2005 to encourage the transition to more of a clean energy technology.

At the beginning of the week, I had the view or the understanding that the disagreement about the tax package centered around the question of which offsets should be used to pay for it. I thought there was general consensus that we ought to have an extension of these tax provisions but that there was disagreement about how we went about paying for them. 

It is clear to me that at least for the administration, it is not a question of which offsets should be used to pay for it, the real issue, from their perspective, is they do not consider these tax incentives very important, and they do not believe they are important enough to be paid for. 

They believe if they are going to be extended, they should be extended without any increase in revenue anywhere else in the Tax Code to offset that. This is a very unfortunate view on the part of the administration as I see it because it sets up a circumstance where, if we are not able to get the votes to pass this tax package as part of the overall energy package this morning, then we are in a circumstance where the administration says: We will not support--the administration will not support--a tax package that is paid for, and the Congress, under our pay-go rules, most likely will not be able to muster the votes to pass a tax package that is not paid for. 

So we have a checkmate situation that is particularly bad for the country and cuts short the effort we tried to begin in 2005 to encourage more development of energy from renewable sources and more energy efficiency through these tax provisions. 

There are some in the Congress, in the Senate, who are going to say, well, they support doing something on taxes but not here, not now. We should not do it as part of this bill. We ought to do what we can. It is nearly Christmas, and then we will come back next year and deal with taxes. 

The problem is, it does not get any easier next year to deal with this situation. We have already made dramatic changes in this tax package to accommodate concerns of the administration, concerns of Republican Members. But the truth is, we need to go ahead and extend these tax provisions as part of this bill. We need to do so in a way that is paid for. Clearly we need to comply with our pay-go rules and not just add this to the deficit and say it is up to the next generation to worry about finding the revenue to pay for the tax provisions. 

I believe it is essential that we pass this, that we go ahead and invoke cloture on the energy package. This energy package that Senator Reid is now bringing before the Senate does not have a renewable electricity standard in it. He dropped that again because of opposition from Republican members, opposition from the administration. 

But it does have CAFE improvements, it does have renewable fuels standards, it does have energy efficiency standards, it is does have this tax package. I urge my colleagues to support it. 

I yield the floor.