George Miller: “Mr. Chairman, we are about at the end of this debate, under the rule. I want to say to my colleagues who have been…”

“Mr. Chairman, we are about at the end of this debate, under the rule. I want to say to my colleagues who have been listening to the debate, we were told at the outset of this debate that this legislation had nothing to do with salvage. During the debate we learned it had a lot to do with salvage. Although we changed the words, it was still basically a salvage and commercial timber bill. We were told with the offering of the Smith amendment this debate and this bill had nothing to do with roads. Now we see, with the debate of the Smith amendment, it has everything to do with roads, because the proponents of this legislation do not believe that we can have forest health if we do not continue to push roads into roadless areas, into areas that have not yet been logged. Yet, all of the scientific data that we have gathered says that in fact the areas where there are already roads, where there is a $10 billion backlog in the Federal effort to go back and try to restore and clean up those forests, those are the forests that are most devastated.”