Political Quotes

“It has been over 6 months that my colleague, the gentlewoman from Oregon [Ms. Furse], launched a campaign and I joined with her, as did many others on both sides of the aisle, to cancel the emergency salvage timber sale rider, aptly named Logging Without Laws. It was signed into law last summer, attached to the fiscal year 1995 supplemental appropriations bill providing emergency relief to Oklahoma City bombing victims. The rider never received a hearing or a separate vote. It suspends environmental laws pertaining to the cutting of timber on public lands and the results have been expensive to both the taxpayer and the environment. So why do we need to continue it? The Forest Service already has ample authority to do salvage logging without the rider. In 1994, the year before the rider, the age and deceased salvage, 1.5 billion board feet, which is one-third of all Federal timber logged. Then, too, a judicial decision escalated the sales by requiring immediate logging of all previous uncompleted timber sales in the Northwest since 1990.”