WASHINGTON – This morning, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved Senator Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act, which would remove the $75 million liability limit enjoyed by oil companies that spill. The bill would retroactively remove the cap for BP and the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The bill survived an attempt by Senator Inhofe to gut it with an amendment that would put the president in charge of setting liability caps on a rig-by-rig basis – all Democrats voted against that amendment and all but one Republican voted for it. The bill now heads to the full Senate for consideration.

“I applaud Chairman Boxer and the other supportive members of her committee – including Senator Lautenberg, a lead co-sponsor – for their swift action on this important legislation. This bill is simple and common sense – it asserts that we want to protect coastal families, not oil company profits. It asserts that oil companies should bear the burden of the economic damage their spills cause, not taxpayers. As we see the images and read the stories from the Gulf Coast night after night, it could not be clearer that coastal families and taxpayers are the ones who need protection, not oil companies. I look forward to this bill passing the Senate in the near future, and I hope that we will have more than one Republican join us in preserving this bill as it moves forward.”