Dale Bumpers: “This says exactly what I have been saying, and that is, the President ought to veto the Interior Appropriations bill if…”

“This says exactly what I have been saying, and that is, the President ought to veto the Interior Appropriations bill if my amendment is defeated. And I personally think he will. With all these disasters which I have addressed, all we have had is one delay after another. In 1993 they said, ``Well, we are working on a mining bill,'' and in 1994 the same people who said we are working on a mining bill and we should not deal with these regulations did everything they could to stall until 2 weeks before we were to go home to make sure there was no mining bill. And then last year they said, ``We want all the Governors to have a say in this. Don't put a regulation into effect that prohibits the leakage of cyanide from a gold mining site unless all the Governors have signed off on it.'' They backed off that and they said, ``Well, they have to be consulted.'' We said, ``Fine, they ought to be consulted.'' So they were consulted. And the president of the Western Governors' Association told the Senate Energy Committee that ``We have been consulted.'' So what do they do then? They come back and say, ``Well, now we want the National Academy of Sciences to study the regulations''--anything under God's sun to keep from dealing with an unmitigated disaster. Why are the people of America indifferent? They don't even know about it. There is no hard rock mining in my State.…”