Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to H.R. 471, the Fix Our Forests Act, sponsored by Chairman Westerman. While this bill is flawed, and we will be discussing those flaws here in a moment, I do appreciate that Chair Westerman and Representative Peters did come together to work on this issue in a bipartisan way that acknowledges our wildfire crisis. That is a good thing. Addressing that should be a bipartisan priority, and the Fix Our Forests Act includes some helpful provisions. For starters, it has incorporated a number of key Democratic priorities that are in direct alignment with the recommendations of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. That is what is referenced in this poster here behind me, 148 nonpartisan consensus recommendations for making us safer from the threat of wildfire. If this bill simply moved those consensus recommendations forward and also did something that the commission told us we had to do, a critical priority, which is to fund them and make sure that the agencies responsible for overseeing these projects have staffing--if this bill were simply doing that, we wouldn't be here today because this bill would already be law, and many of these good things would already be keeping communities safer. Mr. Chair, as you will hear in a moment, this bill goes off on some tangents that have nothing to do with fire safety. Also, with respect to the good provisions it does include, it fails to fund them. That is why we are here.…”