Denny Rehberg: “I feel like I have been watching the screenplay from Dumb and Dumber. We all admit that the last few years of managing…”

“I feel like I have been watching the screenplay from Dumb and Dumber. We all admit that the last few years of managing our forests has been dumb. If we pass this substitute, we are even dumber than I thought we were. We are changing this bill from a healthy forest bill, by passing this substitute, to a healthy community bill. I am not against healthy communities, but I can tell my colleagues, from being in an area where we fight these fires, the communities are the first things that we come in to protect when the fire gets treated. We go in with bulldozers, and we clear it out. So they are probably the last ones that need our help because we always find the money when the fire is going on. What we need to understand is that dead and dying grass is every bit as bad as overgrazed grass. The dead and dying trees are every bit as bad as overlogging trees. I look up in the audience and I look out at America and I see people with hard hats and what do I think of? I think of heroes, because they use their capital, they use their labor, and they use their equipment to go in and cut down the trees. We tell them to. I look at the gentleman from Washington's (Mr. Inslee) picture of a tree. The Members cannot tell me whether that is a healthy tree or not sitting 2,000 or 3,000 miles away looking at a picture of it.”