Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to this amendment, and let's talk about some facts and some figures and some numbers. The good gentleman from Massachusetts continues to say that we need to treat this land the same as private land. The thing that's really fascinating to me is that we have in Colorado and Utah and Idaho many people who would like to actually do their grazing on State lands or private lands, but the difference is that in Massachusetts only 1.6 percent of the land is actually Federal land. In fact, if you look at the acreage, 81,000 acres in Massachusetts are Federal lands. That's why they can actually rely on many other things for their grazing and many other things that they do. In Idaho, 68 percent of the land is Federal land. In fact, we're talking about 32.5 million acres in Idaho that are actually having to be managed by the Federal Government and that we have to deal with on a daily basis in the State of Idaho. I think most grazers, most producers would actually like to be doing it on State lands where they actually will be paying more, but they actually receive more benefit for being on the State-owned lands than the State-managed lands. My question to the gentleman is: Why doesn't he allow Idaho and other States in the West to do what we want to do, which what we want to do is we actually want to manage our own lands. We have been asking that for a long time.…”