Political Quotes

“I feel, the moratorium has been very detrimental to scientific listing of plants and animals. During the period of time this moratorium has been in effect, the Senator from Nevada and the junior Senator from Idaho have been working on a reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act. I acknowledge that we need to reauthorize the Endangered Species Act and make some changes in it. We need more public input. We need more involvement of the State governments that simply are not allowed in the act anymore. We need peer review. We need better science in listing these species. And there are a number of other proposals that I think--I do not think, I know the Senator from Idaho, as chairman of the subcommittee, and I want to put into a bill for reauthorization. What the moratorium has done, as far as this Senator is concerned, is it has prevented us from going forward on reauthorization, because there are some who simply want no further listing. As I mentioned just a short time ago, I say to the Senator from Nebraska, when the moratorium went into effect we had 182 candidate species, and in addition to that we had 243 species already listed with which we have not been able to go forward.”