Dale Bumpers: “I have never felt more comfortable with a position in my life than I do on this. It has nothing to do with Alaska or…”

“I have never felt more comfortable with a position in my life than I do on this. It has nothing to do with Alaska or Utah or Idaho. What it has to do with is saying this language of the senior Senator from Alaska, No. 1, has no business in this bill; No. 2, if it did, it is a terrible amendment; No. 3, men and women of good will could sit down and work out a sensible policy for the Department of the Interior and require them to report back to us with regulations or something else. But under the existing law, what the amendment of the Senator from Alaska does is to return the determination of whether these thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles of claimed rights-of-way constitute a highway within the definition of the Hodel policy. It is a question of whether or not we are going to allow rights-of-way simply because they were claimed to be there before 1976 when we repealed R.S. 2477, whether we are going to allow the use of those rights-of-way to cross wilderness areas, national parks, monuments, all kinds of protected Federal areas. I submit to you that the people of this country, if they knew the substance of this debate, that we were actually considering the Stevens amendment to this bill, if they knew what the implications of that were, they would be up in arms.…”