Angie Craig: “last Friday at about this hour I stood on the floor of this Senate to describe a crisis that my State of Idaho and its…”

“last Friday at about this hour I stood on the floor of this Senate to describe a crisis that my State of Idaho and its citizens were at the brink of, a crisis that had resulted from a Federal judge's order to immediately halt all economic activity on nearly 14 million acres of my State. At the time I spoke, Idaho families and communities stood on the brink of financial ruin, through, frankly, no fault of their own, but because the Federal Government had failed to perform its responsibilities in a framework that was required by the law. Since I spoke on Friday many of my colleagues have asked me about the situation in my State. I rise this afternoon to give Members a status report to the Senate and, frankly, to the Nation. I say to the Nation, because we will not find this story reported on the front page of any newspaper outside the State of Idaho, probably because nobody would believe the magnitude of the potential catastrophe that was at hand in my State. This action was taken in the name of saving an important Idaho resource--the salmon, three species of salmon--on the Snake and Columbia River systems of the Pacific Northwest, an anadromous fish that spawns in the headwaters of my State of Idaho and listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. But surely it was not necessary to shut down virtually all activities on six national forests with only 1 day's warning to save these species of fish.”