George Miller: “I hate to belabor the point, ladies and gentlemen, but the gentleman from Ohio has simply not answered the question the…”

“I hate to belabor the point, ladies and gentlemen, but the gentleman from Ohio has simply not answered the question the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Dingell] and others have asked, and that is: Why do you have a ban on volunteers? And we are told that we have a ban on volunteers by the gentleman from Ohio and the gentleman from California only because we want good science. Well, if a PhD, if a Nobel Prize winner wants to volunteer, they cannot volunteer, because this says, ``No volunteers in the USGS'', so a Nobel Laureate cannot go out on the weekends and take water samples, take a little test tube, put it into the river and collect it and give it to a government scientist, because it says, ``No volunteers.'' It does not say, ``Volunteers except for Einstein.'' It says, ``No volunteers.'' So you have not answered the question. It is not a property issue, because we just accepted the amendment offered by the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Kolbe] that says you can go onto private property if you are, in fact, invited by the owner of that property, as we have seen with a number of timber companies that want this service provided so they can design their cuts to maximize the efficiency of their operations and environmental protection. So you are stuck here with something that does not quite smell right. Now what else have you done? You really denigrate hundreds of thousands of people in this country.…”