Mr. President, I rise today on behalf of myself and Senator Hutchison, to introduce bipartisan legislation that would expand No Child Left Behind professional development funding to include training for teachers and school personnel on how…

Mr. President, I ask I be permitted to speak as in morning business. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered. Arrest and Detention of Nambaryn Enkhbayar

I can't thank the Senator enough. I am very worried about this leak. I was reading the London news clips, and as the Senator knows, I chair the Senate Intelligence Committee. I believe I can speak for the leadership of both committees in…

Mr. President, for about the past week I have been very concerned and involved in a situation involving Mongolia. It is a small country. It has been a democratic country for the past 20 years. At one time it was part of the Soviet bloc but…

I am particularly interested today in suggestions of what needs to be done legislatively and administratively to unravel the paralyzing tangle of litigation, over-regulation, and endless deliberation that have misguided our federal…

But once we get through the bureaucratic process, then the litigation starts, and the litigation has no chance of success but it is able to delay the process enough so that we can't salvage any of that timber, which is simply insane.

But the point I want to emphasize is this is not some great step forward. It is not even an incremental step forward compared with the catastrophic decline in timber sales that has occurred over the past 20 years.

Only in America will you have the government that pays, that actually gives grant money to environmental groups, and these same environmental groups sue the government.

You can't blame the Senate or the President for that. All appropriations originate in the House.

And frankly, I would challenge the Republican majority in the House to bring that to a halt.

Representative McClintock spoke to that, and it was by 2001 that most of the big mills closed.

Now it seems the Federal Government has to pay you to remove timber from the public lands.

The concern I am trying to explore is that just the bureaucratic delay alone in preparing the sale consumes a great portion, if not the entire portion, of the salvage time that you have to go in and get that timber for high-value products.

It used to be that lumber companies would bid for timber on Federal lands. They would pay the Federal Treasury to purchase that Federal timber.

We're told that there isn't enough money for forest thinning, and yet we used to have no problems keeping our forests thinned and healthy when we sold commercially viable timber.

When the mills in my district closed in 2009 the owner made it very clear that although the economic downturn was a catalyst, the underlying cause was the fact that 2/3 of the timber they depended upon was held up by environmental…

The result is now clear and undeniable: economically devastated communities, closed timber mills, unemployed families, overgrown forests, overdrawn watersheds, jeopardized transmission lines, rampant disease and pestilence and increasingly…

Eliminating Federal Red Tape and Excessive Litigation is indeed the only path to Create Healthy Forests, Jobs and Abundant Water and Power Supplies.