Political Quotes

“Mr. President, my friend from Arkansas and my friend from Louisiana are in some kind of a dream world. The fact of the matter is that the statistics they talk about, for example, 300,000 acres damaged--the State of Nevada alone has 75 million acres. The Western United States is a vast area that still has areas in need of development. The mining industry has the best blue-collar jobs in America. The price of gold is at a 19-year low. Companies are filing bankruptcy. People are being laid off. The mining industry creates a favorable balance of trade for gold. The problems that they talk about are all problems that went on decades and decades ago. What we are talking about here is there are some regulations that the Secretary of the Interior who can't legislate-- they have tried, they can't legislate anything--so he said, ``We're going to get to you anyway, Mr. and Mrs. Mining Company; we're going to do this through regulations. We're going to show you if we can't legislate, we will regulate.'' What we are saying is, Mr. Secretary of the Interior, if you want to regulate, let's have the National Academy of Sciences, an impartial, unbiased, very recognized, sound scientific body look at these regulations to see if they need to be changed. We are willing to abide by what they come up with. This is not some antienvironmental rider that is going to turn present regulations upside down.”