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House GOP wasting time with political messaging bills

September 14, 2012

Today, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6213, the No More Solyndras Act, by a vote of 245 to 161. The bill freezes the Department of Energy’s (DOE) loan guarantee program by barring it from considering loan applications submitted after 2011. The loan guarantee program—created out of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress, and signed into law by a Republican President—has led to the creation of 60,000 jobs, doubling of renewable energy production, and leveraging of tens of billions of dollars in private capital for clean energy projects. Despite its name, the bill does not actually end the DOE loan guarantee program that Republicans have spent the past year investigating.

Following the vote, members of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC) released the following statement:

“The No More Solyndras Act is another political push by this do-nothing Republican Congress. It represents election year politics at its finest. And, despite its title and Republican rhetoric, the bill does nothing to end the DOE loan guarantee program; Republicans in fact decided not to include an amendment to end the program in the bill. That is why even conservative groups like Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Heritage Foundation, the National Taxpayers Union, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have sighted failings with the bill. This perfectly demonstrates how the Republicans—instead of doing the people’s business that we were sent here to do—are going about politics as usual at the expense of the American people. Republicans need to stop helping their Big Oil friends and start seriously focusing on job creation and economic opportunity.”

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee have spent almost all of the Committee’s budget investigating Solyndra.

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