Todd Young: “I thank Ms. Granger for yielding, and I thank Ms. DeLauro for the work you have done, but I cannot support this bill.…”

“I thank Ms. Granger for yielding, and I thank Ms. DeLauro for the work you have done, but I cannot support this bill. Before giving my short testimony, I would like to quickly congratulate Lydia Jacoby from Seward, Alaska, on winning an Olympic gold medal on the 100-meter swim. She is 17 years old. That is something to smile about. I want to thank, very frankly, the majority side. Thank you for getting me elected every time, which you do. Because every time we have an appropriations process, you add a provision in there preventing access to building roads in the Tongass National Forest. As long as you keep doing that, I am going to get reelected, so I thank you for that. In the over 60 years I have lived in Alaska, I have watched tens of thousands of jobs in the logging industry and support industries shrivel up and not be there anymore. These are working American jobs. The economy in southeast Alaska is hurting, and it is not because of a poor timber market; it is because of, very frankly, radical environmentalism. The timber industry supports great-paying, year-round jobs in southeast Alaska. Even though the environmentalists have already succeeded in locking up over 96 percent of the Tongass forest, eliminating most of these jobs, they are now after the remaining 4 percent of that land mass. Where this idea came from, other than extreme environmentalists, I don't know.…”