Political Quotes

“The amendment that's being offered is perfectly appropriate. It's the duty of the Department of the Interior to carry out the law. The law requires the Secretary to review, from time to time, the status of public land. All too often, I hear my colleagues on the Republican side say that this is government land. No, no, no, this is not government land. This is our land. This is the land of the American people, owned in common for the common good. And the Secretary, carrying out that responsibility, reviews the attributes of the land. Is it good for oil? How about gas development or coal development? Or maybe it's useful as grazing land, or perhaps it should be wild and scenic land and preserved for the purpose of remaining in its most natural state. So my Republican colleagues come up and say, No, you can't look at the land. You can't study the land. We just won't want to know anything about the land, except to allow for the destruction of the land. This particular amendment doesn't come in a vacuum. This amendment leads to the House floor another bill that is likely to move out of the Resources Committee and soon be on the floor, which would take the previous work done over the last 30 years that would quantify the values of the land, scenic, natural, wilderness, and push all of that aside and say, Open all the land, all the land to what was euphemistically--I hope euphemistically--called mechanized conservation.…”