Pete Domenici: “So she came in and said: Let me help. She went to meeting after meeting. Of course, they invited me and my staff. I had…”

“So she came in and said: Let me help. She went to meeting after meeting. Of course, they invited me and my staff. I had more than a few things to do, and I probably was there less than the Senators I just mentioned, but I came. I was one who pursued it and pushed it. On the Democrat side of the Agriculture Committee, the Senator from Arkansas, Blanche Lincoln, was there all the time. She came to these meetings and she is for it. Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana, a State with huge problems, he was there. He is for it. Everybody knows the Senator from New Mexico is for it. I have been trying to do this for 10 or 12 years. I got one big bill through that nobody thought could happen in the midst of the forest fires. It passed in an amendment on the floor. We got $250 million times 2--that is $500 million--for each agency. We named that bill ``happy forests.'' We named it happy forests because we thought if it works, these forests that cannot see sunlight may see sunlight and they might be happy when they look up at the sun. So I nicknamed the bill the happy forests, with the trees of America once again being unclogged. The clogging makes the trees limp but also makes them burn like wildfire. We got that one through and it did a lot of good, but we are stuck with the problem that this bill tries to solve; namely, we cannot get anything done in a reasonable period of time. That is the issue. We do not have to talk about the fancy words, jurisdiction, courts, and all of that.…”