Political Quotes

“I want to tell my colleagues first about part of that compromise. A number of the groups that have written in saying they have some problems with the bill, and the first biggest problem has been taken care of, and that was using the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That is now no longer a problem. They said there was another problem. They said, you are changing the Clean Water Act. Well, once again, we have a legal opinion voiced by a number of attorneys who should know who say that one cannot clean up a river using wetlands under the present tight construction of the Clean Water Act because, it says, if one takes a bucketful of water out of a river, one has to return that bucketful of water in drinking-water form. Now, one cannot do that if one builds a series of marshes along the New River, as we intend to do. We intend to build one of the biggest wetlands projects in America that will host hundreds of thousands of birds, hundreds of species, and yet, because of the way we wrote the Clean Water Act, we cannot do it, so we live with the most polluted river in North America in New River.”