Angie Craig: “When I went home during the August recess, I held meetings with the agricultural community. The Senator from Illinois…”

“When I went home during the August recess, I held meetings with the agricultural community. The Senator from Illinois has a good many farmers, but there was a different kind of person in my meetings than could possibly have been in any meeting he would have. That was a public land rancher. Because the Senator from Illinois knows he doesn't have ranchers and grazers on the public lands of the State of Illinois. But the Senators from Idaho and New Mexico and the Senator from Iowa do--thousands of them. Their livelihood depends on access to the public lands and a perpetuation and a continuation of that access, to keep their ranching operations alive. The Senator from Illinois understands that. He has already expressed that as it relates to financing and banking. What is important here--and I wish to express something that probably no one coming from a public land State would miss--is that there is a very different word, a single word in his amendment that does not exist in law today and should not be put in law.”