Landry continues beating the drum in Congress

Rep. Jeff Landry continued his streak of criticizing the federal government during a speech Thursday, comparing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to a children’s game – albeit one rigged for failure.

“Completing a Corps of Engineers project is like playing a game of Chutes and Ladders, except there’s a chute at every square on the board and there isn’t a ladder in the game,” he said.

Landry chided the 21-steps the corps must satisfy before it can begin a project and said Congress needs to enact Corps of Engineer reform in eliminating extraneous studies, penalizing budget gaffes and having “the corps make a promise to you – our local state voters – that when they start a project in our area, it must finish in our lifetime.”

The comparison came on the heels of a remark that the corps was “pumping some of the most fertile soil in the world into the abyss.” The congressman said the corps could restore 18 square miles of the coast per year with the material.

“They literally look at our coast as a balance sheet and say it doesn’t make financial sense to create a new coastline,” Landry said. “In my mind, they are dead wrong. The Corps should look at the cost savings of creating a new coastline and see how it actually saves money. It saves in future levee costs, it saves in flood insurance premiums and most importantly, it saves lives.”

The Corps of Engineers wasn’t Landry’s only target in his message directed toward an agreeable audience. During the keynote speech from the Bayou Country Club in Thibodaux for the annual Bayou Industrial Group Banquet, Landry continued his blasting of President Obama’s stance on domestic energy sources.

As the 30-minute speech was hitting its crescendo, Landry turned his attention to the fact that no drilling company has secured a deepwater exploration permit in the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon blast last April that killed 11 workers and spewed 180 million gallons of oil into the water.

“The president’s de facto moratorium on domestic oil offshore drilling is causing America to be evermore dependent on foreign sources of oil,” he said. “Every day we fail to utilize our own resources in the Gulf of Mexico and across America is the day that our economy continues to be held captive by clashes in Libya, by dictators in Venezuela and by terrorists in West Africa. At any point in time, a conflict in the Middle East can erupt and hold our economy hostage because the president is fantasizing about an oil-free, green energy policy.”

He admitted to being repetitive but said that won’t stop him from “beating the drum,” which he credits for his appearance on Fox News last month and for eliciting criticism from perceived left-leaning media sources.

“It’s the drum beating that got me on Fox News a couple of Sundays ago and got me attacked by The New York Times and MSNBC. I hope they do it again. I continue to get support in my district when they do those things. I wanted to send flowers to the editor of The New York Times.”

Landry said the Natural Resources Committee has agreed to visit the 3rd Congressional District in April to get a first-hand account of La. Highway 1, which serves as the only ground-based means of traveling to Port Fourchon, a topic he has been drumming with his colleagues.

“Port Fourchon is a good example of the interdependency of our transportation network,” he said. “This port is one of the busiest ports in the world, responsible for 18 percent of the oil and gas our nation uses.

This port supplies 30 percent of the seafood the nation consumes. However, without Louisiana 1, Port Fourchon is literally cut off from the rest of the nation. Think about this: a rural, two-lane highway is the only connection between the nation and $173 billion of economic activity.”

Whether or not the rest of Congress is listening to him, Landry says he will continue to make his voice heard.

“The folks up there may not understand my accent or know what I say all the time, but they sure know when I’m talking and that I mean business.”