Mark Souder: “I rise tonight to oppose the Interior appropriations bill that is likely to come upon us, at least in the form that we…”

“I rise tonight to oppose the Interior appropriations bill that is likely to come upon us, at least in the form that we have been hearing about. It is pumping millions of dollars into the appropriations process but guts CARA, the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, that three-quarters of this House voted to support. CARA has a trust fund. When we talk about the Medicare and Social Security trust funds being restored, we also have an obligation to put the money into other trust funds before we engage in disbursing it into various appropriations accounts. We have a number of smaller trust funds but they are nonetheless trust funds where we take fees from people and tell them they are going to be used for an intended purpose and then divert it, here in the case of many people who hunt or fish or pay different fees and have had their fund diverted into the general budget. Secondly, by gutting CARA, this will hurt our efforts to increase oil drilling and compensate for that oil drilling through additional environmental resources in the States where the drilling is done. This was a delicately crafted compromise. Alaska, California, and Louisiana are States that are going to be most directly affected by the oil drilling.”