Political Quotes

“I simply want to make the point that my colleague, the gentleman from Washington, and I complimented the committee for its effort to begin with, has pointed out some of these particular projects: the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. I simply want to make the point that project is only $1 million. The second project that he cited is also only $1 million. We have left, under my amendment, a substantial sum of money in the bill so that we could go through and acquire much of this land in the current year as planned; and even with that, if we restored $23 million, we will probably have to come back here and put more money into wildfire fighting next year. But I would simply say that it should be obvious to anyone, certainly it is obvious to the people of Arizona, that the devastation of these wildfires has not stopped and is not going to stop. I would point out that my colleague on the opposite side of the aisle just fought us, at least his side of the aisle did, and objected to an effort by our side to allow a thinning of the forest, to allow us to clean out the fuel wood load so we would not have the devastating crown fires we now have. Some of the Nation's best experts are in Arizona. Dr. Wally Covington of NAU has said the only way we can save these forests is to clean out the fire load, fuel load that is underneath them.”