Political Quotes

“I offer this amendment, which strikes a million dollars out of the Fish and Wildlife account and it inserts $571,429 into the Reserve Maintenance account. So it is a net savings of $428,571, which would go to deficit reduction. But my purpose is not to focus on the deficit reduction component of this, Mr. Chairman. My purpose is to make the statement that we have watched in that Missouri River system, the Pick-Sloan system that has six dams upstream and the longest channel in the United States going downstream, and we suffered a flood last summer, the 2011 flood of epic proportions. The system had been designed and completed in 1968 based upon the largest runoff ever, which was 1881. Now it's 2011. Now the Corps of Engineers declares that last year's flood was a 500-year event. USGS says it's between a 70- and a 1,000-year event. The Corps picked the 500-year event, which defines it as an anomaly for them, and they refuse to manage the river in a fashion that protects us from serious downstream flooding. So instead of creating a habitat for fish and wildlife, which is the least tern, the piping plover, and the pallid sturgeon, now we have hundreds of miles of camel habitat--sand and dead trees--from the flooding. I have a bill, H.R. 2942, that needs to move through this Congress.…”