Martin Sabo: “Mr. Chairman, I intend to vote no on this bill. Let me just say as background, before I came to Congress I spent 18…”

“Mr. Chairman, I intend to vote no on this bill. Let me just say as background, before I came to Congress I spent 18 years in the State legislature, 8 years heavily involved with putting State budgets together, with that primary responsibility in dealing with the relationship of the State to local units of government throughout our State. So I fully understand the impact; maybe not fully, I understand partially, because I do not know if any of us understand fully the impact of the relationship between one unit of government to another, and I understand there is a problem of mandates. But what I fear is happening here is total overreaching. I find unbelievable that we could start as a basic premise of law, as a Federal Congress, to say to someone like me from Minnesota, at the top of the Mississippi, that if you want to dump your sewage into the Mississippi at the Iowa-Wisconsin border, it is of no relevance to the Federal Government unless the Federal Government pays the full bill. That is the concept of this legislation.”