Political Quotes

“Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Chair, I am glad we are finally here on the floor today talking about an issue that is important to our whole country. I appreciate the gentleman from Colorado and his concerns about wildfires. I wish that we could work together on actually solving these issues in a manner and with policy that would actually do something. I learned in engineering school that expending effort is not work. For example, you can push on a boulder all day, but until something moves, no work has been accomplished. To put it another way, there is a saying that you should never confuse motion with action, which is exactly what the legislation before us today does. This bill is more than 550 pages yet does absolutely nothing to prevent wildfires or significantly improve our resiliency to drought. This bill will actually make our wildfire crisis worse. Perhaps that is why my Democrat colleagues named it the Wildfire Response Act, instead of naming it the wildfire prevention act, which is what we should be focusing on because we will have to respond to all the wildfires that are going to happen anyway and the new ones that this bill creates. Here is a little bit of forestry 101. There are two ways to reduce wildfire risk: thinning and controlled burning. This bill mentions thinning zero times. Not once does it mention thinning, but it mentions environmental justice 165 times. That should tell you what this bill is really about.…”