Amid presidential campaign, Beto O'Rourke flips positions on a 2016 offshore drilling vote

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Amid presidential campaign, Beto O’Rourke flips positions on a 2016 offshore drilling vote

"He wouldn’t cast that same vote today with all that he knows and all that he has heard from people," said a spokesman for the former Texas congressman.

BY JAY ROOT at The Texas Tribune

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/04/06/beto-orourke-flips-positions-2016-offshore-drilling-vote/?utm_campaign=trib-social-buttons&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

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For him it’s looking for ways to harness American ingenuity and resources and doing it with our environmental standards rather than relying on nations who have no environmental standards, so that was the explanation at the time,” Evans said. “But then you know the follow up to that is he wouldn’t cast that same vote today with all that he knows and all that he has heard from people.”

O’Rourke, who represented El Paso in Congress for six years, voted with the majority of Republicans to defeat the anti-drilling amendment from then-U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, D-Florida. The amendment would have prohibited “the use of funds being used to research, investigate, or study offshore drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico Planning Area.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation issued an alert urging a “no” vote, saying the amendment “would block any potential progress that could take place by preventing the necessary work that would need to be prepared in the East Gulf for potential lease sales and eventual production.”

The amendment failed on a mostly partisan 185-243 vote; 22 Republicans, many representing the impacted area, voted for the coastal protection amendment. O’Rourke was one of 22 Democrats, nine from oil-rich Texas, who voted successfully to kill it. If he had a do-over today, though, O’Rourke — who calls climate change an "existential threat" — would not oppose the measure, said Evans, the campaign spokesman. He also pointed out that O'Rourke has a 95 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters.


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