Melanie Stansbury: “I deeply appreciate my friends across the aisle for their clarification of their intent, but unfortunately, we can't go…”

“I deeply appreciate my friends across the aisle for their clarification of their intent, but unfortunately, we can't go forward based on intent. We actually have to go forward based on the bill that they introduced and are asking us to vote on. I am going to do a little reading from your bill to help clarify for the American people what this bill actually says. First of all, it addresses security of tenure. For folks that aren't familiar with this kind of jargon, that means ownership, who gets to hold the rights to this land. Then it defines the kinds of operations that would be tied to this tenure. So let me read them to you. This is what it says in the bill: ``Prospecting, exploration, discovery and assessment, development, extraction, or processing.'' It also goes on to clarify that you can do any activity that is found to be reasonably incident to an activity described in another clause of this bill. It goes on to say right here in the bill, words on the page, and this is what we were asked to vote on: The ``Rights to Use, Occupation and Operations''--which we have already laid out is basically anything you want to do on the land--``A claimant shall have the right to use and occupy to conduct operations on public land, with or without the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit. . . . `' Yo. This is a giveaway of our public lands.…”